Indian director Aamir Bashir, who presented his directorial debut Harud (Autumn) at the London Film Festival, is disheartened about common Kashmiris having no voice at all, especially in light of 20 long years of ongoing conflict in the region.
“The political discourse in Kashmir is in the hand of the two nuclear powers. The Kashmiri voices, even now, when there have been four months of conflict and protests in the Valley, are still unheard. Even now the mainstream media says, ‘We don’t know what they want.’ More than 100 young people have died. But the discourse in the hands of the state and the independent media seems to only follow the nationalistic line on the Kashmir issue,” Mumbai-based Bashir, who has acted in television and Hindi films, said.
Kashmir-born Bashir made the film, which has its international premiere at the Toronto film festival, with his friend and national award winning cinematographer Shanker Raman. The two friends, who first met as students at St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, have also co-produced and co-written it.
Bashir is very keen to get the film a theatrical release in India. “It is important for the film to be seen in India. We are telling the Kashmir story from an insider’s perspective, and not an outsider’s as has been attempted in the past,” he said.
The film, which was mostly filmed in Srinagar and Gulmarg, speaks with silence, few dialogues and almost no music. It is a dirge about the psychological decay that Kashmiris living in the Valley have faced since the 20 years of conflict.
“We took four years to come up with a 55-page of screenplay and kept paring it down, to come to an absolute minimum,” Bashir told this newspaper in an interview. “Autumn in Kashmir is associated with decay, in anticipation of a dark-cold winter. The family in the film is actually going through autumnal decay.”
The independent film, which was shot in one month, faced a lot of tough conditions while filming in Kashmir.
“We submitted the script of the film to the ministry of defence as we wanted help of the Army while shooting the film. We are a small film and we didn’t have the budget to recreate everything on our own, but we ultimately did not get any help from them,” Bashir, who is taking his film to more festivals like the South Asian International Film Festival in New York, Dubai Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival and the Mumbai International Film Festival.
“It is a difficult film to live in, therefore it is a difficult place to film in. Even the people in Srinagar, they don’t trust anybody, especially people from outside carrying a camera. Rightly so, I guess they are concerned about how they are going to be portrayed in their own story,” he said.
Laughing at the question whether he had a solution for the Kashmir conflict, Bashir said: “It’s a very complex problem, I am just a story teller. I just put a story out there, I don’t have a solution.”
The film was made in Hindi/Urdu and not Kashmiri. “If we had made the film in Kashmiri it would have taken out the Indian market altogether because people in India don’t watch subtitled films. We didn’t want to dub our film. If we had made the film in Kashmiri, it would have become a regional film, from a region that does not produce films, which would have made it even difficult to put it on DVD. It was the only time in making the film that we took a commercial decision,” he said.