Experience

Politics get personal in "Project Kashmir"

By Jonathan Kiefer

If you were to close your eyes and only listen to the voices of Project Kashmir, you’d hear a tangle of Hindi, Urdu and Kashmiri, in addition to variously accented English. Even if you knew the place well, you probably wouldn’t be able to perceive every nuance of what’s being said. But you would be able to hear the mutual despair.

Many people who do know the place agree that it is among the most beautiful on Earth, just as readily as they disagree on who belongs there. Thus the Kashmir status quo, as one New York Times headline glibly if correctly summed it up, of “terror in paradise.” More than 68,000 people have died from violence there during the past 20 years, more than 30,000 still live in refugee camps, and more than 6,000 are reported missing. Of course that means it is one of those places where people don’t just disappear, they get disappeared—and then their loved ones get exhausted from looking for them, and give up, and get exhausted again by the guilt of giving up.

This can’t just be about obvious tensions between India and Pakistan, between Hindu and Muslim. If there is one single, indisputable fact of life in a place beleaguered by half a century’s worth of political, cultural, national and religious friction (and that’s only counting as far back as the region’s contentious partition in 1947; the full history, of course, goes much deeper), it’s that the situation is drastically complicated.

But at least the Project Kashmir concept was mercifully simple: Co-directors Senain Kheshgi and Geeta V. Patel, two American friends with family ties to opposite sides of the conflict, went there together to see what they could learn—and what the rest of us could. In other words, if all you really know with any certainty about the area is that it shares a name with a single Led Zeppelin song, do not be afraid to make a date with Project Kashmir.

It may sound like heavy going, and it is, but Kheshgi and Patel’s film already has proven its versatile appeal. Having sold out limited engagements in other American cities and recently screened to full houses in the documentary competition at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Project Kashmir also plays on Thursday, March 26, under the banner of a month-long mini-fest of Human Rights Watch films at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Part of what makes this film so compelling is its near-total lack of vanity. It is anything but a shrill pronouncement-maker, and that alone should count as a victory. Thanks in part to the democratization of filmmaking and journalistic technology, not to mention the Internet-shrunken world, there’s no shortage nowadays of motion-picture documentaries—but one obvious side effect of that proliferation is a noisier chorus of voices. The pronouncements pile up, and real clarity gets even harder to come by. So Kheshgi and Patel do themselves and their viewers a great service by acknowledging at once—and throughout the film—just how daunting and confusing their subject really is.

As soon as the women are warned, early on, about discrepancies between what they’ll be told and what they’ll actually see, the enormity starts to show in their expressions. And so here they are, “with no provision but an open face, along the straits of fear,” as Robert Plant would have it. Anyway, that warning about the dubiousness of information, among others about the potentially fatal dangers of gathering it, comes from a local Muslim journalist, Muzamil Jaleel, who also serves as one of their guides.

In a typically brisk and potent scene, Jaleel strolls through a so-called “martyr’s graveyard,” pointing out the tombstones of teenagers he used to know. “The story of Kashmir is right here,” he says. Then he and the women are all in a car together, and he’s elaborating his expectation that the next ten years will bring a whole new generation of extremists. Then he’s thinking aloud about where next to bring his guests. “We’ll try to go into my school, if they let us in,” he says. Now it’s a security-force camp.”

“Is it not a school anymore?” one of the women asks.

“It’s a school as well.”

Again, their faces darken. Eventually they do get inside the school, but the armed guards don’t like the looks of their camera (the film is attentively shot by lauded cinematographer Ross Kauffman, of Born Into Brothels). Well, they were warned.

One lesson Kheshgi and Patel learn is that seething is contagious. Strains on their friendship erupt and subside, movingly, as they discover and deal with the latent biases lurking under their admitted ignorance. Patel can’t help but feel self-conscious a Hindu Indian woman in a mostly Muslim culture controlled by Indian military administrators. Kheshgi finds herself speaking up on behalf of those who oppose the occupation. “It feels so good to not feel like a minority,” she adds. “I finally feel like I’m a part of this Muslim majority.” Hearing this, her friend looks stricken.

But maybe it’s a necessary step toward proper acclimation. Other guidance, of sorts, comes from Khurram Parvez, a human rights activist who lost his leg to a car bomb, and Aarti Tikoo Singh, a displaced Pandit Hindu who returns with the filmmakers to the rubble of her childhood home, where a former neighbor greets her insists that she join him for tea.

It’s a beautiful scene—maybe not enough to fully mitigate the overwhelming awareness of how many angles there are on this pervasively debilitating trauma, and how they’re all so personal, but at least enough to quiet, briefly, all those weary voices. If you were to close your eyes, you might miss it.

topics: digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, independent film, political film, world cinema

03.19.2009