Review of the film "No father in Kashmir": In search of missing fathers

In recent weeks, two films have turned on the missing and half of the widows of Kashmir. Hamid, where the problem is seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old child, moves in its simplicity and humanity. No father in Kashmir examines it through two teenagers – a British Kashmir girl and a local Kashmir boy – who share the trauma of the missing fathers. In the previous film, politics moved away to focus on the human impact of political machinations. In No Fathers … Ashvin Kumar attempts to introduce equal humanity and politics to the screen.

Some things stand out. A single mother who tries to move on after the disappearance of her husband is a rare trope. Zainab (Natasha Mago) wants the closure, while those around her feel that it's "inappropriate" for her to live and travel with another man. His own dilemmas, suffering and hesitation, but the concomitant acceptance of his decision by anxious step-parents (Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Soni Razdan) are well understood and comforting.

However, the crucial point is the unique bond that unites Joel (Zara Webb) with his daughter and Majid ( Shivam Raina). It is a poignant relationship in the shared destiny (of fathers gone missing) and in the betrayals and guilt he faces. Ironically, they are clichéd and unidimensional representations – Kumar's own turn as a hardliner becomes too confusing and broad as the army officer does to filthy mischief played by Anshuman Jha. The nuance is totally absent here.

It was also extremely incredulous to find a Kashmiri teenager posing as a "terrorist" for a Facebook page. Even if an unthinking "selfie with a terrorist" might come from a carefree British child, it is hard to imagine such suspicious and perilous entertainment from the torn life in the Kashmir powder keg.

Kumar has a solid background in documentary making and a solid foundation in the politics of the state ( Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir), Reason which one could have expected A much more striking and incisive story in the film than what we can finally see.

The absence of father in Kashmir brings me back to the 2012 film of Amir Basheer, Harud . Basheer's film was a much more evocative view at the edge of the valley ring – in its severe silence, its dark, autumnal landscape and the haunted faces of its inhabitants, in the agitated search for those who had disappeared. Not to mention the documentary Iffat Fatima Khoon Diy Baarav (Fire is lost), is perhaps the most intense and authoritative work on the thousands of unexplained disappearances of Kashmiri men. Fatima's film particularly haunts the way he documents women in the state, who use their relatives' memories as tools for personal and political resistance.