[Reader-list] film screening at Majlis, tomorrow!

[hansa thapliyal]

Do come ,
Hansa

Majlis presents the Bombay premier of:

Yi As Akh Padshah Bai (There was a Queen…);
105 minutes

Kashmiri/Urdu/Hindi/English with English subtitles
Date: 6 pm, Saturday, 24th November, 2007.
Venue:
'Majlis',  1st Floor, Christina Apartments, Lane opp S.V. Electronics, near Kalina Police Chowky,  Kalina Market,Santa Cruz(East),Bombay
phone: 65017723


Directed by Kavita Pai and Hansa Thapliyal
Produced by Other Media Communications
Camera: Ranu Ghosh
Sound: Gissy Michael
Editing: Gouri Patwardhan
Music: Manish J. Tipu

Synopsis
"Give us guns and we'll play our role!"
This is what Farhana had to say, less than a week after her sister was buried.

Farhana's sister Shahnaza, and her friend, Ulfat, victims of 'crossfire', were barely seventeen when they died - as old as the tehreek that exploded into existence in 1989, shattering forever the peace of the Valley, turning it into one of the most critical conflict zones in the world.
Over these eighteen years, flashes of intensified conflict and bouts of negotiations have followed one another with monotonous regularity in Kashmir. Newspapers and television channels manufacture predictable binary images of conflict – angry men and weeping women, misguided innocents and fundamentalist separatists, victims and aggressors. Over and above these is the image that erases all differences – the Kashmiri as terrorist.

When we set out to make a film on peace initiatives by women in Kashmir, the question uppermost in our minds was, are women in Kashmir not Kashmiri, do they really want peace? At what cost? If women want peace then what about the men, don't they want peace too, aren't they human? Can 'peace' still the turmoil at the heart of every Kashmiri? What are the conditions that beget violence, that drive young men to take to the gun? What then, are the conditions for peace?

It felt strange to speak to women, only women, ignoring the other half. So we spoke to a few men – one a former militant, another who had sent his son for training across the border with his blessings, a third, a school master, who lost his son in a gun battle only to realize he was a militant, a fourth, a school boy, whose brother was killed in crossfire – we spoke to men and realized that while every story in Kashmir has the power to shock and move, while the stories of both men and women were compelling in their honesty, in their rage, in their grief, in their helplessness, in their contempt, in their fierce refusal to forget, the women's stories are markedly different in their determination to survive, to nurture.

It is through these women – proud, strong, with an undying zest for life – that we try to explore what peace means and how it can come about in Kashmir.

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