The turmoil in Indian-administered Kashmir is an urgent topic but Ashvin Kumar’s coming-of-age film feels lifeless and leaden
Ashvin Kumar is an Indian film-maker who has made Kashmir an urgent focus of his career and was Oscar-nominated for his short film from 2004, Little Terrorist, about a Pakistani boy playing cricket who goes in search of his ball knocked over the Indian border. This nfilm, of which Kumar is writer, director and co-star, is about a very pertinent contemporary topic: the “disappeared” people of Indian Kashmir – reportedly now as many as 8,000 – picked up by the Indian forces and imprisoned without trial or access to family or lawyers as a result of the heavy-handed new security crackdown following the government revoking Kashmir’s independent status last year.
In this story, a 16-year-old Kashmiri-British girl called Noor (Zara La Peta Webb) goes to Kashmir with her mum, Zeinab (Natasha Mago), and her mum’s new partner, a somewhat pompous Indian government apparatchik. Zeinab is on a mission to have her parents-in-law sign official documents declaring her husband dead so that she can remarry: Noor’s dad is one of the “disappeared”. Once there, Noor befriends 16-year-old Majid (Shivan Raina), whose father is also one of those made to vanish by the brutal military.