Trailer: Kashmir – Journey to Freedom

Kashmir – Journey to Freedom

A film by Udi Aloni. [Official Site] | [IMDB]

This is the story of a stateless nation that has become a tragic and deadly war zone, a land enveloped in a night of terror for 60 years, and a people born with no choice but revolution or despair.

The people in Kashmir live under a terrible and unprecedented military occupation, which denies its own existence and remains invisible to the world. Before 1943, Kashmir was a distinctively peaceful region characterized by harmonious religious coexistence between its Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist communities. But today, divided between India and Pakistan, and labeled as terrorists and fundamentalists, Kashmiris are trapped in the middle of a tense and bitter conflict that has already exploded in three full-scale wars, leading to the nuclearization of India and Pakistan.

This film tells the story of a new generation of young Muslims that, inspired by the Sufi culture and Kashmir’s long history of ethnic and religious coexistence, started a non-violent movement in the hopes for a new peace in this land of mythic beauty that straddles between two anxious and volatile nuclear powers.

Israeli director’s film on Kashmir earns Indian ire

Srinagar, Feb 09: Indian authorities have taken umbrage at Kashmir: Journey to Freedom and are refusing to allow American-Israeli director Udi Aloni to return to India, after his film was premiered in Panorama section, at the Berlin Film Festival which showcases independent and arthouse cinema.

Aloni tells how a new generation of young Muslim Kashmiris, after years of armed resistance, decide to lay down their arms and start a nonviolent resistance movement – in the hope of finally achieving peace and independence.

In Kashmir – Journey to Freedom, Udi Aloni portrays with many personal accounts the will and the intense efforts being made to restore the peace that has eluded this region carved up by the neighbouring states for more than 20 years.

However, the film has not gone well with Indian authorities. A diplomat from the Indian Embassy was among the Berlin film audience, Aloni called to him, saying he should be allowed back into the country.

Aloni’s protagonists are shown as they launch their new struggle. Ultimately denied permission to return to India, he was forced to tell the rest of the story far from the land he had come to admire.

“Send them a message, please let me return to India. I really miss my friends from Kashmir, and I really love to be in India,” he said while defending his documentary and insisting he’d done India a good service in making it.

Aloni said he’d gone to Kashmir without really knowing what he was going to see, and that his film was less a documentary, “more an action movie of a different sort.”

“I have alway believed in non-violence,” he said.

A press release about the film said that Kashmir, once described by Mahatma Gandhi as “a pillar of light in a subcontinent lost in darkness,” had become “a land of terror and despair, its people suffering under the strain of constant violence and human rights violations.”

Born in December 10, 1959, Aloni is an American-Israeli filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose works frequently explore the relationship between politics and theology, with emphasis on the theology of secularism. He began his career as a painter, establishing the Bugrashov gallery in Tel Aviv, a home for contemporary art, cultural and political events. His work in large-scale art led him, while living in New York in 1995, to invent a method for hanging advertisements on urban architectural structures, and for this he is credited as the artist who redesigned New York. In 1996, Aloni began making films. His documentary, Local Angel (2002), and his first feature-length fiction, Forgiveness (2006), are both radical interpretations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have stirred controversy in the Middle East and internationally.

Related: Full List of Articles on Kashmir posted on PKKH

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