Paper short abstract:

The film enters the vexed political scenario in Indian Controlled Kashmir through the lives of families of the victims of enforced disappearances. A non-sequential account of personal narratives and reminiscences it seeks to confront advocates of amnesia in Kashmir as well as in other conflict zones. 

Paper long abstract:

The conflict in Kashmir is among the long-standing political conflicts in the world. It has taken a heavy toll on lives, on sanity and on the idea of normality. While it has turned the Indian state coarse and brutal, it has turned the local population, recipients of several decades of unrelenting violence, defiant and angry. The film Khoon Diy Baarav made over 9 years explores memory as a mode of resistance, constantly confronting reality and morphing from the personal to the political, the individual to the collective. A non-sequential account of personal narratives and reminiscences ruptured by violence, undermined by erasure and over-ridden by official documents that challenge truth, it questions the militaristic approach to resolve political problems, by which communities and lives within it get invaded and destroyed, even as it shatters personal dreams and desires. The film appeals for a political resolution to the Kashmir issue, which has by now affected five generations of people in the region.