Paper short abstract:

The film attempts to challenge dominant narratives of victimhood of women in Indian-controlled Kashmir and resist the ‘official’ cultural producers’ exoticised iconography.

Paper long abstract:

The film attempts to challenge the dominant narratives of victimhood of Kashmir women by bringing to fore their stories of resistance and spaces contextualising their experiences.

Using intergenerational narratives, personal histories, archival photos, poetry, songs and images, the film sets out to challenge the dominant images of representation and exoticised iconography reinforced by Bollywood and attempts to explore myriad forms of resistance employed by the Kashmir women in their day-to-day lives; witnessing, grieving, praying, celebrating, walking, dreaming—the film endows each act with deep political meanings.

Interweaving memory into physical spaces renders spaces into characters. The filmic narrative is strung together with filmmaker's poems through which she explores her memory and embeds herself in the film, punctuating the inter-generational women's narratives.

The act of remembering against the institutionalised amnesia is a recurring motif in the film, resisting hegemonic narratives by the exploration of 'counter-memory'.

Through a confluence of academic discourse and documentary practice, the film seeks to explore possibilities of excavation of 'subjugated knowledges' by bringing to fore perspectives that hegemonic practices have foreclosed, thus not only aiming to explore counter-histories but raising questions on the practice, process and form itself.