[Reader-list] [Announcements] Screening of 'How We Celebrate Freedom'/'Jashn-e-Azadi' by Sanjay Kak

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Friends,

This is to announce two screenings of Sanjay Kak's new documentary film 
on Kashmir - 'Jashn-e-Azadi'/'How We Celebrate Freedom'

1. on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 7 PM, at the Stein Auditorium the India 
Habitat Centre, New Delhi

2. and on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 5 PM at Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road

A brief synopsis is placed below, but if you would like to know more 
about the film, do take a look at the lively and frequently updated blog 
of the film  at <kashmirfilm.wordpress.com>

warm regards, and do pass the word around.

Shuddha

------------------------------


Jashn-e-Azadi

< how we celebrate freedom >

written and directed by sanjay kak
photography ranjan palit
edited by tarun bhartiya


It's 15th August, India's Independence day, and the Indian flag
ritually goes up at Lal Chowk in the heart of Srinagar, Kashmir. The
normally bustling square is eerily empty– a handful of soldiers on
parade, some more guarding them, and except for the attendant media
crews, no Kashmiris.

For more than a decade, such sullen acts of protest have marked 15th
August in Kashmir, and this is the point from where Jashn-e-Azadi
begins to explore the many meanings of Freedom–of Azadi–in Kashmir.

In India, the real contours of the conflict in Kashmir are invariably
buried under the facile depiction of an Innocent Population, trapped
between the Terrorist's Gun and the Army's Boot. But after 18 years of
a bloody armed struggle, after 60,000 civilians dead (and almost 7,000
enforced disappearances), what really is contained in the sentiment
for Azadi–for freedom?

Amidst the everyday violence and ever-present fear in Kashmir, there
are no easy answers to such questions. Where truth has been an early
victim, all language–speech, poetry, even cinema–becomes inadequate to
describe what we know and feel here. So we reshape our curiousity, and
point ourselves at what we can see, what we are allowed to see. The
film then combines several forms and modes of expression to evoke the
past as well as unravel the present:

We are witness to an ageing father in the Martyr's Graveyard; we are
with a group of men as they survey the dead in the mountain villages
of Bandipora; we sit quietly in the Out Patients Ward of the Govt
Psychiatric Hospital in Srinagar.

But we look elsewhere too, in the satirical farce of Bhand folk
performers as they play in a village square; in the tense
undercurrents of an Army Sadhbhavna (Goodwill) camp in north Kashmir;
and in the images conjured up by the work of contemporary Kashmiri
poets.

Shot and edited between August 2004-2006 Jashn-e-Azadi engages us with
the idea of Azadi in Kashmir.

In 2007, as India celebrates it's 60th anniversary of Independence,
this is also a conversation about Freedom in India.

138 mins / Digital Video
Kashmiri/Urdu/English (English subtitles)
2007 (under production)


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