After decades of silence, Kashmir’s cinema is lighting up again—giving a new generation a screen to reclaim its stories, memories and cultural identity
By: Basharat Hijazi
For four days this month, something quietly remarkable happened in Srinagar. Crowds gathered at the INOX Multiplex and the Sher-e-Kashmir Convention Centre, not for a political meeting, a government function or a public protest, but to watch films. Kashmiri audiences turned up in large numbers for Tasrufdar and Batt Koch, filling halls that, for a long time, had seemed almost unimaginable as regular spaces of public cultural life. At the inaugural International Film Festival of Jammu and Kashmir, three of the five films made by filmmakers from Jammu and Kashmir that competed in the local selection category went home with awards.
It was more than a successful film festival. It was a glimpse of a cultural awakening.
For a region that spent decades being photographed, filmed and interpreted by others, Kashmir is beginning to turn the camera around. Its filmmakers are increasingly telling stories about Kashmir from within Kashmir—stories of memory and migration, love and loss, relationships and reconciliation, humour and ordinary life, folklore and changing social realities. After years in which conflict overshadowed almost every aspect of public life, a new generation appears determined to remind the world that Kashmir is not only a political geography or a spectacular landscape. It is also a civilisation of stories.
And cinema may become one of the most powerful ways of telling those stories.
The significance of this moment becomes clearer when viewed against the long and painful history of cinema in the Valley.
Kashmir’s relationship with the moving image is not new. Cinema arrived in the region decades ago and gradually became an important part of urban life. Cinema halls became gathering places where families went together, young people met friends and generations discovered stories from across India and the world. Srinagar once had a lively cinema culture, with theatres such as Palladium, Regal, Broadway, Neelam, Shiraz, Khayam, Naaz and Firdous forming part of the city’s cultural landscape. Other towns also had their own theatres.
For many Kashmiris of an earlier generation, going to the cinema was as ordinary as going to a market, a restaurant or a public park.
Then came the years of violence.
The turbulence that engulfed Kashmir from the late 1980s onwards did not spare its cultural life. Cinema halls were among the institutions that suffered a devastating blow. Theatres closed, audiences disappeared and an entire ecosystem of film exhibition, production and entertainment collapsed. Some cinema buildings were abandoned, some were repurposed and some became symbols of a cultural life that had been interrupted.
The consequences were deeper than the closure of a few buildings.
Kashmir lost one of its important public spaces of imagination.
For a young generation growing up amid conflict, curfews, uncertainty and disruption, entertainment itself became scarce. Theatre struggled. Music performances became difficult. Cultural gatherings diminished. Cinema disappeared from everyday life. The absence of these spaces created a void that cannot be measured simply in terms of lost business.
A generation was deprived of the ordinary pleasures that other young Indians took for granted.
The cinema hall was not merely a place where a film was projected. It was a place where people experienced emotions together. They laughed together, remained silent together, applauded together and occasionally walked out debating the story they had just watched.
When those spaces disappeared, a part of the social fabric disappeared with them.
There were attempts to revive cinema. Some theatres reopened in the late 1990s, but the environment remained fragile. The reopening of Regal cinema in Srinagar was followed by a grenade attack in September 1999, killing a civilian and injuring others. The experiment with reopening cinema halls could not survive the continuing atmosphere of insecurity. One by one, the theatres again fell silent.
The darkness that descended on Kashmir’s cinemas lasted for years.
But the remarkable thing about culture is that it rarely disappears completely.
It waits.
And Kashmir had an enormous cultural reservoir from which a revival could eventually emerge.
Long before cinema, Kashmir had its own sophisticated traditions of storytelling. The Valley’s literary history is extraordinarily rich, stretching from the mystical poetry of Lal Ded and the lyrical world of Habba Khatoon to the poetry of Mahjoor and the modern literary movements that followed. Kashmiri literature has always possessed a strong instinct for observing society, questioning convention, exploring human emotion and preserving memory.
Its theatre tradition is equally important.
Bhand Pather, with its combination of satire, music, performance, humour and social commentary, represents one of the oldest and most distinctive theatrical traditions of Kashmir. It was theatre rooted in the community and performed for the community. It could entertain while simultaneously commenting on society and human behaviour.
This heritage matters enormously to the future of Kashmiri cinema.
Cinema does not have to begin from nothing in Kashmir. The stories are already there. The characters are already there. The folklore is already there. The poetry is already there. The humour is already there. The drama has been part of Kashmiri society for centuries.
What has been missing is a sustained modern ecosystem capable of bringing all of this together.
The first Kashmiri-language feature film, Mainz Raat, released in 1964, demonstrated that Kashmir could speak to the screen in its own language. Films such as Shayar-e-Kashmir Mahjoor subsequently showed how cinema could preserve the memory of the Valley’s literary figures and cultural traditions.
But the industry never received the uninterrupted space required to mature.
Instead, Kashmir became one of Indian cinema’s most frequently used locations.
For decades, filmmakers came to the Valley because its mountains, meadows, lakes, snow and architecture offered an extraordinary visual canvas. From Kashmir Ki Kali and Jab Jab Phool Khile to Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Haider and Raazi, Kashmir repeatedly appeared on the Indian screen.
Yet there was a striking contradiction.
Kashmir was everywhere in the frame, but Kashmiris were often missing from the authorship of that frame.
The Valley was frequently presented as a landscape before it was presented as a society.
That is what is beginning to change.
The new generation of Kashmiri filmmakers is attempting to reclaim the gaze.
Instead of allowing Kashmir to remain merely a beautiful backdrop for stories conceived elsewhere, they are beginning to make films about people who live here, families shaped by the region’s history, relationships altered by displacement, communities negotiating memory, young people searching for identity and ordinary Kashmiris trying to live ordinary lives.
This is perhaps the most important development in the current revival.
The story of Kashmir is finally becoming a story told by Kashmiris themselves.
Kapil Mattoo’s Tasrufdar is an especially significant example. The film, which won Best Film in the Jammu & Kashmir Select category at the inaugural IFFJK, draws upon Kashmiri folklore and brings together the experiences and memories of Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits through a deeply local narrative. Its recognition at the festival demonstrates how stories rooted in Kashmir can travel beyond their immediate setting when they are told with cinematic confidence.
Batt Koch, with M.K. Raina portraying an ageing Kashmiri Pandit returning to his ancestral home, explores another layer of the region’s complicated emotional history. Such stories are important because they allow cinema to move beyond political abstractions and enter the intimate spaces where history is actually experienced—in homes, relationships, memories and personal journeys.
This is where cinema can perform a role that politics often cannot.
It can humanise history.
It can allow two people with different memories of the same place to see each other not as categories, but as human beings.
It can create room for questions that do not have easy answers.
It can preserve pain without becoming imprisoned by pain.
And it can allow a society to remember without surrendering its capacity to imagine.
The talent emerging from Jammu and Kashmir also makes clear that the problem was never a lack of ability.
M.K. Raina’s extraordinary contribution to Indian theatre and cinema has long demonstrated the depth of talent originating from the region. Mir Sarwar has worked extensively in Kashmiri cinema as well as major Hindi productions including Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Kesari and Jolly LLB 2. Sadia Khateeb, originally from Doda, has appeared in films including Shikara and The Diplomat. Their journeys illustrate that artists from Jammu and Kashmir can operate successfully within the national cinematic space when opportunities are available.
Filmmaker Rahat Kazmi represents another dimension of this expanding creative landscape. His recent work has taken Kashmiri filmmaking into international collaborations, while Love in Vietnam was screened at IFFJK. His cinematic journey demonstrates the possibility of a Kashmir that does not remain confined to a regional cultural market but participates in international storytelling.
These individual journeys are important, but the future will depend on whether individual success can be transformed into an ecosystem.
Kashmir has talent.
What it still needs is machinery.
The region needs professional post-production facilities, sound studios, editing suites, colour-grading facilities, visual-effects expertise, production designers, trained cinematographers, screenwriters, casting directors, line producers and film technicians.
Young people interested in filmmaking need opportunities to learn the craft systematically rather than being forced to leave the region in search of every professional facility.
A film industry cannot be built only with cameras and enthusiasm.
It requires institutions.
It requires financing.
It requires training.
It requires distribution.
It requires audiences.
And it requires continuity.
The challenge before Kashmir is therefore not simply to produce a handful of good films. It is to create an environment in which filmmaking becomes a sustainable profession for an entire generation.
That would have implications far beyond cinema.
A functioning film industry can create employment for actors, writers, directors and musicians, but also for electricians, carpenters, drivers, costume designers, makeup artists, location managers, sound engineers, editors, photographers, graphic designers, caterers and scores of other professionals.
A stronger film ecosystem could also strengthen tourism, hospitality, local handicrafts and cultural enterprises.
But the greatest opportunity may be cultural rather than commercial.
Cinema can become an archive of Kashmir.
A film can preserve the sound of a disappearing dialect, the architecture of an old neighbourhood, the craftsmanship of an ageing artisan, the rituals of a village, the songs of a folk musician or the everyday life of a family undergoing social change.
A generation from now, the films being made today could become visual records of a Kashmir that no longer exists in the same form.
That is why the revival of cinema must be accompanied by a revival of the wider arts.
Kashmir should not build a film industry disconnected from its literary and theatrical inheritance. Its writers should be encouraged to write screenplays. Its poets should find new audiences. Its theatre practitioners should be given platforms. Its folk artists should be documented and brought into contemporary productions. Its universities and colleges should expose students to film appreciation, theatre, literature, photography and other creative disciplines.
There is enormous potential in bringing together the old and the new.
Imagine the stories that could emerge when the traditions of Bhand Pather meet contemporary cinema; when the poetry of Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon inspires modern screenwriters; when Kashmiri folklore is transformed into animation; when the lives of craftsmen become documentaries; when the old city of Srinagar becomes the setting for contemporary drama; when young filmmakers explore the changing lives of apple growers, artisans, students, entrepreneurs, women and migrant families.
The possibilities are virtually endless.
And there is another reason to take this revival seriously: the mental and social space occupied by art.
Young people need more than academic qualifications and employment opportunities.
They need spaces in which they can imagine, create, question, perform and communicate.
For a generation that inherited the consequences of decades of conflict, the return of cultural spaces can be profoundly meaningful.
A cinema hall can be a place of recreation.
A theatre can be a place of expression.
A library can be a place of discovery.
An art gallery can be a place of reflection.
A film festival can be a place where Kashmir meets the world without having to surrender its own voice.
These are not luxuries.
They are components of a healthy cultural society.
The crowds witnessed at the recent festival therefore deserve to be understood in a larger context. They were not simply audiences buying tickets. They were evidence that there is an appetite for stories, for entertainment, for culture and for collective experiences that had been absent for far too long.
The young people of Kashmir deserve the chance to grow up with cinema as part of their cultural life rather than as something they have to travel outside the Valley to experience.
They deserve to know that filmmaking can be a career.
They deserve to see their language on screen.
They deserve to see their streets, villages and communities portrayed with complexity.
They deserve stories that acknowledge Kashmir’s wounds but do not define every Kashmiri exclusively through those wounds.
And they deserve stories that make them laugh.
For too long, Kashmir has been asked to explain its pain.
Its artists should now also be allowed to celebrate its life.
The inaugural film festival has provided a glimpse of what that future could look like. Tasrufdar, Batt Koch and the other films showcased at the event are not merely individual creative works. Together, they represent the early contours of a cinematic vocabulary emerging from within Jammu and Kashmir.
The journey will not be easy. Building an industry after decades of disruption will take investment, policy support, training and patience. But the essential ingredient is already visible: people are willing to watch, and a new generation is willing to create.
That combination can change a cultural landscape.
Perhaps, then, the most important image emerging from Kashmir’s cinematic revival is not that of a famous actor, a spectacular location or a glittering festival stage.
It is the image of an audience sitting together in the dark, waiting for the lights on the screen to come alive.
For decades, darkness was imposed upon Kashmir’s cinemas by circumstances beyond the control of an entire generation.
Today, the darkness inside a cinema hall has a different meaning.
It is the darkness before the story begins.
And this time, Kashmir is beginning to write the story itself.
