[Reader-list] Fwd: There was a Queen on NDTV

[Santhosh Kumar]

Dear friends,

Greetings from Other Media Communications!


NDTV  is screening our film 'There was a Queen' on women, conflict and peace
in Kashmir on  following days:
In two parts on 17th (Wednesday)and 18th (Thursday) of December at 9.30 PM.
And the entire film on 21st Sunday at 1.00PM

Please inform friends and interested.
Please watch the film and write to us your opinion
Visit us:www.othermediacommunications.com

Santhosh

Synopsis of the film

"Yi As Akh Padshah Bai"

(There was a Queen…)

 "Give us guns and we'll play our role!" - These are not the words of a
hardened criminal; these are the words of a teenaged girl in Kashmir less
than a week after her sister was buried.



Farha's sister Shahnaza, and her friend, Ulfat, victims of 'crossfire' would
have been adult women today - they were barely seventeen when they died, as
old as the *tehreek*, the movement, that exploded into existence in 1989,
shattering forever the peace of the Valley, and 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, peace loving Kashmiris and
terrorist Kashmiris, misguided innocents and fundamentalist separatists,
victims and aggressors. Over and above these is the image that erases all
differences – the Kashmiri as terrorist.



The film discusses how women's engagement with everyday violence has led
them to think of issues of security, peace, conflict management and
transformation in the unique situation of conflict in the area. It is also
an exploration of the relationship between the construction of identity of
the community/nation and women's identity and the need for women to be aware
of how and by whom these identity constructs are forged which are usually
not favorable to women's autonomy in the particular culture and nation.



When the directors set out to make a film, they felt strange to speak to
women, only women, ignoring the other half. So they 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 who had lost his son and then realized he
was a militant, a fourth whose brother was killed in crossfire – they spoke
to men and realized that while every story had the power to shock and move,
the women's stories were compelling in their honesty, in their rage, in
their helplessness, in their grief, in their contempt, in their fierce
refusal to forget, in their determination to survive, to nurture.



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


(For DVD copy of the film contact:www.othermediacommunications.com)