“Jashn” in New York

In a week from now Jashn-e-Azadi will screen in New York at the MIACC 09 – Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival – which describes itself as “New York’s Indian Film Festival”. The film will be screened as part of IN FRAME: KASHMIR a Sidebar Program of MIACC 09, organised in collaboration with Alwan for the Arts & 3rd i NY Monthly Collaborative Screening of Arab & South Asian Cinema.

“From fictional narratives to documentary, from feature films for the big screen to multi-media and short films on the web, the complexities of Kashmir as investigated and interpreted by filmmakers in India and in the US. MIAAC09 presents a special focus on Kashmir.

In addition to the screenings below, IN FRAME: KASHMIR will include the screening of Santosh Sivan’s Tahaan, Onir’s short film Omar, and a video installation at Aicon Gallery of MTV Iggy’s short films from their Change: Kashmir media initiative, and Parthiv Shah’s single-channel work, Barbed Wires and Beautiful Skies. A special panel discussion, Kashmir on Film, will take place at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Program details of IN FRAME: KASHMIR as well as all other MIAAC09 events are available at http://www.iaac.us/ and http://miaacfilmfest.org/

Sanjay Kak will also be part of a panel discussion Kashmir on Film at NYU Tisch School, in the MIAAC@NYU series ‘Discussions on the Art, Culture and Politics of Indian Cinema’.

November also has other campus screenings of Jashn-e-Azadi in the US: at Bryn Mawr College on Nov 10, and at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center on Nov 16.

Considering the film has been around for a while, this has been an unexpectedly busy time for screening events: in New Delhi, we had screening/discussions at Jawaharlal Nehru University (School of Social Sciences) and at the Delhi School of Economics (Dept of Sociology). Last month there was a discussion around the film at the Kamala Nehru College, Delhi University, and a screening at the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune, part of the Persistence Resistence festival organised by Magic Lantern Foundation.

And on Dec 6, there will be a screening at Patna, as part of the cultural festival organised by Jan Sanskriti Manch… plenty.

A Practical Nomad and Kashmir

Writing in The Practical Nomad blog, Edward Hasbrouck writes:

It angers me when Kashmir is depicted in the news as the cause or site of a conflict “between India and Pakistan”, as though it weren’t a place and a people with their own culture(s), their own traditions, their own past and present, and their own desires for the future. If there is one precondition for peace in Kashmir, it is that Kashmiris themselves must not be pawns in a geostrategic game, but must have a central role in making the decisions about their homeland.

Then going on to write about Jashn-e-Azadi, he says:

Kak’s film is an important contribution towards a wider understanding of that imperative.

But that’s not the only reason why I quote Edward’s post. It’s to draw attention to another part of his Practical Nomad blog where he writes on “Why do I care about Kashmir?”. Because his interests and activism on issues of peace and human rights, and his work as a travel consultant and travel writer, first intersected for him, he says, on a 1989 trip to Kashmir. As a valuable account of a critical moment in Kashmir’s recent history, I would warmly recommend it.

blogflash: screening report in the “Rising Kashmir”

A young student at Delhi University has written a report of a recent screening of the film at Ramjas College. It was published in the Rising Kashmir a new English language daily from Srinagar, Kashmir.

For the net lazy, we’re pasting it below too.

Jashn-e-Azadi: A screening

Jashn-e-Azadi is a film made by noted film-maker Sanjay Kak. The film has triggered off a heated debate at all its screening-spots, whether in India or abroad, so far. Suvaid Yaseen captures the description of screening at Ramjas College, New Delhi

After planning and re-planning for quite a few months. Finally, the film screening was finalized. Somebody called the Principal in the morning. He asked for the film screening to be stopped as it would hurt some people’s ‘dharmic bhavnaayein’ (religious sentiments). The request, not so humble, was refused.
So, it started at the proposed time with around twenty-five people in the seminar room of Ramjas College. The number was good enough considering it was March as exams in DU are too close and students prefer to complete their assignments than watch a documentary film on some ‘Jashn’ of some ‘Azadi’ somewhere. No prizes for guesses now. The film to be shown, of course, was Jashn-e-Azadi. A film, impossible to ignore, even though people have had varied opinions from one extreme to the other extreme.
Two hours and ten minutes. Entirely new perspective for most in the audience. Shocking, disturbing like never before. Face to face with a reality unseen, unheard, unexpected till the play-button set the disc rolling. No surprises that many were clearly uncomfortable with what they were exposed to. Used to ‘we are the good guys and they are the bad guys cliché’. The film reached its end

Question time:
“Thanks for the bold perspective, the film puts forward.” a lady remarked.
Then the inevitable and oft-repeated question.
“Isn’t the film biased towards the Indian army?”
“Not at all…” was the firm answer from Sanjay Kak, the director of the film.
From being accused of being a Muslim (secretly), to a shame for Kashmiri pundits and the like, he has seen it all. He has been answering questions of all kinds ever since he started making the film. Quite experienced now, I guess. “I am not showing you the army killing, torturing and raping. I have just shown their mere presence and the after effects of violence which people face.” Well reasoned. If just showing of the army on screen seems biased, what would it be like amidst them? The question remained open for those who care to think, even if little and for just a while.

Then what followed was shocking, disturbing and irritating for those who know the ‘other side’ of the story. Kashmiris. A tragedy, anywhere, everywhere. A Kashmiri guy, who has studied outside the Valley from sixth class, at least, and now doing his business in Delhi only, spoke. The view was that Kashmiris are completely responsible for their miseries. The militants were all supported from outside. All were interested in moneymaking. (Later it turned out that somebody had taken money from his father at gunpoint so he had been nursing a grudge against the militant movement. Granted to an extent. But aren’t there black sheep everywhere around us? Is it a reason enough to malign the whole movement? No. Not at all. It’s myopic.)

So, again Sanjay presented the arguments. “The average life of a militant in J&K, who has taken up arms against the Indian state, is not more than one or one and a half years. Picking up the gun in the Valley is like signing one’s death warrant. The army presence is massive and overwhelming. To be a militant in Iraq is easier than in Kashmir. For less than a thousand (as claimed by the Indian govt.) at present there are at least seven lakh armed forces. Even then if you think that moneymaking is the sole objective of all fighters, you need to correct your understanding. Why do you think those people come out in such large numbers on the funerals of martyrs? Women wailing and beating their chests. People shouting slogans.”
“Couldn’t it be due to the fear factor?” asked a newly appointed teacher.
“Very possible that people come out due to the threat of militants. But how can you make them feign emotions? How can you make women cry by force? Passion cannot be generated artificially. People can’t be coerced into it. It’s so only when those killed are martyrs of just cause for the population.”

Questions, counter questions, answers. All continued for a while. Some very important issues were raised and discussed. The control of army over the people’s lives in the villages of Kashmir. The majority of Kashmiri people reside therein and it’s the villages of Kashmir where you can see the raw emotions against the occupation. Humiliation, torture, gazes. The interference in the village affairs is too much to bear. Peoples’ movement both to and from the villages is closely watched.

Hulk sits on the chest of the poor guy halting his breath, choking, suffocating him. Former India, latter Kashmir. That was the analogy given in response to a question on the future and alternatives provided by the call of Independent Kashmir. Azadi. You make normal life an unaffordable luxury for an entire nation unleashing a reign of state terror, torture and murder. And then you question the pros and cons of the movement and expect it to be hundred percent progressive, modern, non-violent and feminist. Plus you are the sole judge to give a decision after deciding what those terms mean and the compatibility of contesting replies to those definitions. Asking too much. Ain’t it?

Discussion over, the Speaker-Director and the audience both were thanked for coming. People who watched the film left. Thinking, pondering. Most disturbed, uncomfortable. Truth does disturb. More so, when it is unpleasant and related to you somehow.

For those who haven’t yet seen the film, some genuine advice. Must-Watch-it. It’s great.

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi (Celebrating freedom, Wounded by freedom) is the title of a review of the film by Priyadarshan, the poet, writer and journalist. It was first carried by the Hindi newspaper Aaj Samaj, New Delhi 15 March 2008, and for those who can read Hindi, it’s also available on Priyadarshans’ lively blog bharosa.blogspot.com

We are making available here an (unauthorised!) translation of the review:

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi (Celebrating freedom, Wounded by freedom)

Looking at the young faces present in that little room in the Arts faculty of Delhi University, I was more anxious than pleased. Brought up on the glamour of Bombay cinema, of films like Chak de India and Taare zameen par, would these boys and girls be kept interested by Sanjay Kaks’ two and a quarter hour long documentary? A documentary that does not have a clear story line, no actors, and a complicated conclusion which fuses History and Geography in ways that seem always ready to slip out of one’s hands and mind?

But Jashn-e-Azadi began, and all my doubts were dispelled. On that mottled white wall, as images and sounds emerged, the wall itself disappeared, the room vanished, and despite the ambient light in that room, so did the faces of those who had gathered to see the film. What emerged slowly was the truth about the valley called Kashmir, where freedom is an illusionary word.

This is that tattered Kashmir, where amidst falling snow a father looks for his sons’ grave – once a commander with HM, the Hizbul Mujahideen, now dead. The father has come on Eid day so that he can read a benediction in his sons’ memory. In this Kashmir people count their dead as if they are remembering things lost. In this Kashmir a young girl is terrified by her own recounting of an event. In this Kashmir, family members look for a lost child, a photograph in their hands. In this Kashmir young girls carry the marks of terror in their hearts, and even in their dreams they see their dying fathers… In the midst of this, a sadhu mendicant who has come for the pilgrimage of the Amarnath Yatra warns anyone who even lifts an eye towards Kashmir, that he will gouge their eyes out.

No, this is not a film that plays with your emotions. Sanjay Kak has probably intentionally kept away from that easy path. All these images you have to search for – to try and figure out that what it is in this apparently calm film that leaves you so troubled. For it does not give us the luxury of being emotional just for an instant, and then be allowed to forget about it. In this search, when you look beyond a deserted Lal Chowk, where soldiers raise the Indian tricolor and sing the national anthem, or when you see a huge crowd raise slogans of azadi, freedom, its then that you see these faces. That’s when you can see that behind the silence–or clamour–of Kashmir is sadness, we see that tragedy where there are burnt homes, the marks of what looks like dried out blood, and futile attempts to wash out the fresh blood.

Sanjay Kak does not show us too much or tell us too much. Incidents and characters are allowed to speak. On a beautiful lake in Kashmir floats the voice of a poet–binding lost times and places with its lament and its pain. And around this pain there is also the boorish tourist gaze, for whom Kashmir is just some snow upon which they may slide, or a beautiful garden: the excited screams of these tourists inform us that this Kashmir is better than Switzerland. Other than the tourists, there are the Soldiers– running schools for orphans at one place, distributing portable radios at another, and promising that more nice things will follow, and for everyone…

At every step of the film this maze of contradictions seems to hold us back, and often we feel that this film should now get over. But the film is not done even after it is over. While it is clearly a political film, its lessons are still not those of an easy politics. All that one can see is that with 700,000 soldiers, Independence day still has to be celebrated in silence, and events with school children too need to happen behind impregnable security barriers. On the other hand, when the Army kills someone in a so-called “encounter”, the funeral procession for the dead boy turns into a rally for the azadi of Kashmir. It’s quite clear that anger against India’s hegemonic politics and militarised policies has survived all the oppression.

The film raises several important questions about history and the present. Sanjay Kak sees the struggle of the Kashmiris as linked to 500 years of servitude. This leads to a kind of unmediated simplification in which its not easy to understand the dilemmas that have arisen after 1947, as Kashmir has swung between India and Pakistan, both in its society and its politics. Secondly this film does not attempt to articulate the kashmiriyat that is spoken of so frequently. If it did, it would perhaps make it even clearer that identities do not have just one definition, they have many layers, and kashmiriyat too is constructed out of just such layers.

In any event, Sanjay Kak does not seem to be in a hurry to raise the questions or provide the answers. Nor is he trying to weave some sort of story out of all this. Instead, between the scrambled dates and places, he shows us a Kashmir where in twenty years 70,000 people have lost their lives, he takes us to those graveyards where people are recognized not by their names or faces, but by numbers. In the entire film, no Kashmiri Pandits are visible, and this is also represented by Sanjay as a sort of emptiness, towards which peoples’ attention must be drawn. Like a blank space in a painting, which still adds meaning to that picture. Perhaps it’s due to this distant neutrality that the film doesn’t have a specific beginning or end. It seems to go on– and even after it is over.

By the time the film ended in that room in Delhi University, the numbers of those gathered seem to have grown suddenly, and Sanjay was faced with a pile of questions. Questions that tried to understand the extremely complex reality of Kashmir, questions related to the politics and neutrality of the film. Amidst these questions it was clear that Jashn-e-Azadi was successful in its aims–it touches you from a distance, and without your knowing it, goes deep inside of you. That is its major achievement.

blogflash: gorakhpur film festival

This last week has been an exciting journey into an important new territory. It began appropriately, with a screening of Jashn-e-Azadi at the closing day of the 3rd Gorakhpur Film Festival, organised by the Expressions film society of Gorakhpur, in the heart of what is known as the “hindi heartland”.

Gorakhpur is the home of the legendary publishing institution, the Gita Press, of the writer Munshi Premchand, the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri, and of course the eponymous Gorakhnath temple. (In recent years it has also emerged as the site of a particularly virulent format of right-wing Hindu chauvinism, and the importance of the Gorakhpur Film Festival has to be located particularly within this last quite considerable challenge.)

In the 60th year of Indian Independence, the festival significantly chose to stay away from the officially generated celebratory hoopla, and commemorated the event under the sobre slogan of visthapan aur vibhajan ke saath saal (sixty years of division and displacements). It opened with a screening of M S Sathyu’s classic representation of the trauma of Partition, Garam Hawa, and closed on Feb 26th with the first festival screening of our recently completed “Urdu/Hindustani” version of Jashn-e-Azadi.

The Gorakhpur Film Festival showed an interestingly curated range of films, from contemporary documentaries (Ajay Bharadwaj; Biju Toppo; Surabhi Sharma; Vinod Raja) to classics old (Ritwik Ghatak) and new (Saeed Mirza), and a whole Sunday devoted to films for children. There was also theatre, and poetry…

The very well-attended screening of Jashn-e-Azadi was followed by an intense Q&A. This was hugely helped by the fact that the GFF had brought together an excellent group of progressive writers, critics and teachers associated with the Jan Sanskriti Manch (Forum for People’s Culture); and they came from Allahabad, Basti, Bhilai, New Delhi, Patna… Once again the openness and the complex thinking that people brought to their viewing of the film was a vindication of the value of sharing an apparently complex argument. (Never complicate what is simple. Or simplify what is complex…)

In the days immediately before and after the Gorakhpur screening I have had very similiar experiences with discussing the film with groups of young college students at the Jamia Milia Islamia (Awam) and at Delhi University Arts Faculty (Premchand Vichar Manch). Already more and more groups of people have expressed an interest in using the film in India, to raise questions around the hard issues of Nationalism, and Nationality.

Could it be that the film is finally finding it’s mark…?

How we celebrate freedom in Amsterdam. Again

As part of the Himalaya Film Festival 2008 (Feb 9 – 10) there will be a screening in Amsterdam of Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom) at De Griffioen, the cultural centre of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (Uilenstede 106, 1183 AM Amstelveen).

The Jashn-e-Azadi screening is scheduled for Sunday 10 February @ 18:45 at the Filmzaal. More information about the programme is available on the festival website, where you can also order tickets on-line.

(In the forest hangs a bridge, an earlier film by Sanjay Kak is also showing at the festival, parallel with “how we celebrate freedom”, on Sunday 10 February @ 18:45 at the Griffioenzaal.
This is a film about the building of a thousand foot suspension bridge of cane and bamboo by the people of an Adi village, in Arunachal in India’s north-east, an evocation of the tribal community that makes it possible, and a reflection on the strengths–and fragility–of the idea of community. At the 1999 National Awards in India, the film received awards for Best Cinematography [Ranjan Palit] Best Editing [Reena Mohan], as well as the Swarn Kamal [Golden Lotus] for Best Documentary Film.)

blogflash: Jashn-e-Azadi has a distributor!

And finally, here it is: from Jan 2008 the film is available internationally.
No matter where you are in the globe, Indiepix, the New York based distribution company–”committed to bridging the gap between the independent filmmaker and those passionate about independent film”–will make Jashn-e-Azadi available to you!
So now you can Buy the DVD! and have it physically shipped to you. Or you can take advantage of Indiepix’s state-of-the-art “download to disc” technology, and simply Download the film! onto your computer (save yourself some money too!)

The Indiepix website also carries a short Interview with Sanjay Kak, a conversation about the film that he had with Gauri Sathe of Indiepix in New York, in Sep 2007.

(Off the shelf sales of the film in India will have to wait a while: we need to negotiate the choppy waters of the Indian censor board before the film can be freely sold at the video-store in the neighbourhood…!)

Screenings in the UK

Riding on the air-miles of the Amsterdam appearance of Jashn-e-Azadi, the film travelled to the UK, where we did four screenings in quick succession:

The first was on Dec 3, 2007 at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, at the instance of the Department of Media Arts, and Dr Lina Khatib, who has written quite prolifically about cinema in the Middle-East, in particular that of Lebanon. A small group of students and faculty attended the screening, as part of the HARC Fellows’ Seminar Series, and there was a long and detailed discussion that followed, moderated by Dr Yasmin Khan, who is herself the author of a new book about the Partition of the Indian sub-continent.

On Dec 6, 2007 there was a screening at the University of Leeds, in their wonderful Workshop Theatre. The School of English offers a very dynamic course on the Kashmir conflict, taught by Dr Ananya Kabir, so we had an excellent turnout of students and faculty, as well as a sizeable presence of people from the wider community around Leeds, and the nearby towns of Bradford and Birmingham. (This was a relief, since there was a rumour that something called the Kashmiri Indo-European Forum had written into the University authorities asking for the screening to be called off because–and hold it right there, folks–it glorifies terrorists! This sort of irresponsible campaign of calumny is quite familiar to all of us, and ends up contributing nothing to the discourse on Kashmir, and only ends up in a waste of energy.)
For some reason, unfamiliar “tech” gremlins crept into the second half of the screening, and the DVD consequently skipped the last 10 minutes of the film. Several DVDs were offered to the machine, but it was firm in its rejection. But this seemed to not distract the audience too much, and a long Q&A followed. While many of the questions followed a by now predictable pattern, for me what was a completely fresh perspective, were the questions brought in by people in the audience who come from that part of Kashmir that is variously described as Azad Kashmir/Pakistan Controlled Kashmir/Pakistan Occupied Kashmir… One of things that I realised, with some surprise I must admit, is that there are more than 600,000 people in Britain whose origins lie in that part of Kashmir, traditionally described as Mirpur, hence, ‘Mirpuris’.

Dec 7, 2007 there was a screening in London organised by SACREDMEDIACOW, which describes itself as ‘an independent postgraduate collective on Indian media research and production’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. We had an excellent turnout, and that healthy indicator of audience interest–only a handful of the almost-full Khalili Auditorium left before the 2 hour 19 minute screening time! The discussion after the screening was moderated by Sumantra Bose, Professor of International & Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, whose books on Kashmir are probably the two most balanced accounts of the contemporary Kashmir situation I have read. In the course of the last 9 months, over perhaps 40 Q&As, this particular session will remain a high-light: there was something about the audience’s response to the film itself (apart from the Kashmir issue, that is) that was extremely focused, even intense. The best Q&A sessions are those where you find yourself responding with things you’ve never said–or even thought of–before. This was one such.

Dec 8, 2007 saw the UK screenings rounded off by a last-minute improvised screening set up with some friends in the Mirpuri community in Birmingham. About 50 people, almost all of them middle-aged Kashmiris, watched a film about a Kashmir that none of them had ever been to: one of the invisible legacies of that brutal partition of 1947, when most of them were not even born. And yet most in the audience seemed to describe themselves as “nationalists”, by which they referred to their identity as Kashmiris, not as Pakistanis, or even people from “Azad” Kashmir. We talked about the current situation in the valley, the militarisation, the impact of changes in the politics of Pakistan, but there was also a very keen interest in knowing more about the complex issue of the Kashmiri Pandit minority… Over dinner, I must admit, the conversation was much more of an eye-opener for me than Jashn-e-Azadi is for many of the Mirpuri friends: there was at least one insight that deserves a separate post, and I will do that shortly. Watch this space!

Post-script: On Dec 9, 2007 I did a live interview on the Bradford based Aapna Channel (beamed in Europe on Sky Digital 817), a Pahari language (or more accurately Pahari/Potohari/Hindku speaking) channel aimed at precisely the 600,000+ people from the Mirpur district of “Azad” Kashmir. As a concession to my lack of skills in any of these dialects, my interlocutor (the very affable–and yet very political–Shams Rahman), spoke to me in Urdu/Hindustani, and over 90 minutes we really had a good conversation about the film, and Kashmir. We took several calls too, and once again there was a long conversation about the tragic departure of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in the early 1990s…

blog update: Screening @ IDFA

On Nov 28, 2007, Jashn-e-Azadi screened at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (with its ‘international’ title, “How we celebrate freedom”). This was probably the most splendid venue the film will be screened in for a while: Hall 3 of the magnificient Pathe Tuschinski, which is a huge cinema palace located in the Rembrandtplein, in the heart of Amsterdam. “The cinema opened in 1921 and it remains until today with its Art Deco interior one of the most cherished buildings in Amsterdam”, says one guide book and when you walk in, you know just why. The dark wood, its deep maroon carpeting, the under-stated over-the-top aesthetic that spells Grand Europe, such that the multiplexes of today cannot even visualise, leave alone aspire to…

IDFA, as it itself quite nonchalantly admits, is the largest documentary festival in the world: this year, over 10 days, it screened a few hundred films, and sold more than 140,000 tickets! It’s quite simply the biggest, even the brassiest, documentary event that I have ever attended, and a peep into the new world of international documentary cinema. (The short conclusion is: it’s boom time, folks, and as the closing message from Ally Derks, the IDFA director, said, “Move over Harry Potter! Of course many of the films are huge, ambitiously (and expensively) mounted international co-productions (the credits are a treat, just the list of funders usually running into dozens of names!) These are films one of course admires, but from a distance, and to it’s credit IDFA also makes place for the small, the quirky, and even the difficult and the marginal.

But what really makes IDFA are it’s audiences: I don’t think I went to a single screening (and over 5 days I went to 15) that was not nearly full, and most often it was actually over-full. Everyone, including the delegates, were queueing up for the events well before opening time. On one cold, wet, wintery, Amsterdam morning, I was in a queue at just past 9 am, but was rewarded with a ticket to attend a long conversation between the legendary Werner Herzog and the irrepressible Peter Wintonick. It was worth it, if for no other reason, than to hear Herzog rasp out “Accountants!”, his favourite term of derision, his shorthand for all the kinds of people who are inimical to the creative processes of film-making!

In the midst of all this high-voltage excitement, “How we celebrate freedom” was screened at 12.45 in the afternoon, on a working day. But this being IDFA, we had a full house! I was expecting the usual high-ratio of the “South-Asian” audience, but that was another surprise: one brown face, in a auditorium of what I guess were mostly Dutch people! Some were introduced– lawyers, human-rights activists, journaists, but the rest were just walk-ins… impressive. The stunning picture and sound (played from Digi-beta, the first time for us) was a treat, but so was the Q&A that followed, and the conversation with the audience carried on for almost 45 minutes.

As always, the next day Sanjay Kak also did a session with students, this time at the University of Amsterdam, a class on ‘conflict’ in the Political Science department, showing excerpts from the film, and then an animated discussion with a group that by and large knew very little about Kashmir. But it lasted 90 minutes, and the students seemed quite taken aback by the issues that the conflict in Kashmir raises…

blog update – Jashn-e-Azadi has a trailer!

a short trailer for the film, made for the forthcoming
International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam (Nov 22-Dec 2, 2007)