#raqs-e-inquilab

Following the abrogation of Article 370, there has been an unprecedented lockdown in the valley. Niyantha and Mukti will not be able to make Raqs-e-Inquilab today. At this point, we don’t even know when anyone will be able to make a film like this again. Most importantly, we do not know if the artists featured in the film are able to practice and what their state of mind is, or how safe they are. “Our film released on YouTube a few days before Article 370 was revoked, and we had no idea (like most of the country and the world) that such a decision was in the works. We were very keen for the film to be out as soon as possible, and so when Journeyman Pictures expressed interest in distributing the film, we decided to go ahead and put it out through them,” Niyantha starts. Although the artists have seen the film, at the time of this interview (August 28), the crew had not been able to reach them or Azaan Shah (one of the cinematographers of the film). Contact has been severed since August 5.

A documentary that I co-directed, edited and produced, Raqs-e-Inquilab (English title: Art in a Time of Conflict), which premiered at the South Asian Short Film Festival in Kolkata earlier this year is now live on YouTube through Journeyman Pictures, one of the world’s leading distributors of original documentaries.

Raqs-e-Inquilab interweaves the personal narratives of four Kashmiri artists, three of whom – Syed Mujtaba Rizvi, Hina Arif and Zeeshan Jaipuri – are children of the conflict, their impressionable adoloscent years years landing right in the middle of the region’s most violent period in the 90s. The fourth character, renowned painter and art teacher Masood Hussain, grew up in a time of relative peace before becoming witness to Kashmir’s tragic transformation. While their individual traumas are unique, they are connected by their pursuit to process this splintered world through unfiltered artistic expression.

We're forever grateful to Masood sa’ab, Hina, Mujtaba and Zeeshan for trusting us with their stories, and to so many people - from Kashmir, Mumbai and Chennai - who helped us on this two-year journey to make the film and put it out.

Hope you like the film.

“This truth further hit home for us when we filmed an art camp that Hina led at a school in Srinagar, and the majority of images that the children drew represented the signs and consequences of conflict: a bloody chinar leaf, a young girl with tears in her eyes, someone injecting themselves with drugs, a cry for ‘HELP!’, a map drawn with a barbed wire border, a colourful, beautiful bird caged, and so on,” Niyantha says. One of the key questions for the directors when they began their research was what art means to these artists from the Valley. Is it a source of catharsis? A mode of self-expression?