An Israeli filmmaker heading a prestigious jury at an Indian film festival touched a raw nerve by calling Indian movie The Kashmir Files a ‘vulgar’ of ‘propaganda filmmaking’.
Nadav Lapid is a celebrated Israeli screenwriter and filmmaker who has won numerous awards for his films at international film festivals. He was heading the jury for the 53rd edition of the International Film Festival of India, with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as the organiser.
“We were, all of us, disturbed and shocked by the…movie ‘The Kashmir Files’. It felt to us like a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival,” said Labid while addressing those at the festival.
This took place in the presence of multiple Indian ministers, foreign dignitaries and the Israeli envoy. The comments quickly went viral, with Indians showering scorn at their government and tagging the Israeli ambassador over the remarks.
“What a blunder by @MIB_India picking such an idiot who outrightly humiliated the emotions of Kashmiri Pundits,” wrote user with the handle @thehawkeyex.
Others were quick to draw parallels with the Holocaust.
Controversial analyst Tarek Fateh somehow connected the Israeli filmmaker to India’s ‘hostile’ middle class hatred for the country.
For others, the films poor performance at the box office was part of this sinister conspiracy.
A police complaint was filed against the Israeli filmmaker, according to one verified Twitter account.
The situation reached a point where Israel’s ambassador to India Naor Gilon tweeted an open letter to the Israeli filmmaker.
In his letter, he said the filmmaker should be ashamed. In the voluminous open letter, he talks about a creative quid pro quo of sorts referring to potential collaboration between India and Israel on its recent drama Fauda.
Most worrying was his remark about the backlash that Labid’s remarks had generated - particularly for the staff of the Israeli embassy in India.
AltNews founder Mohammad Zubair plugged in an earlier thread that had raised concerns about The Kashmir Files similar to what the Israeli filmmaker had shared.
The film has faced global criticism for its portrayal of the situation in Kashmir.
“A heart-wrenching tale that captures the pain, suffering, and struggle of the Kashmiri Pandit community in 1990 and leads Krishna, a young college student, to set out on a quest to uncover the truth,” says its bio on IMDB. While it has racke up a high rating on the website, critics say that it isn’t representative of the film with most votes by Indian jingoists.
“The Kashmir Files is essentially a battle of narratives, where Agnihotri has determinedly sided with one version of the events. Employing some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions, it propels an alternative view about the Kashmir issue, with the intent to not just provoke… but incite,” said one review published in The Hindu.
“Most critically, this myopic narrative succeeds in obscuring the fact that what happened in Kashmir in the 1990s was not centrally a conflict between Muslims and Hindus. It was an uprising against the Indian state,” opined Delhi-based documentary filmmaker and writer Sanjay Kak in a column published by Al Jazeera.
“Loud, tacky and long, 10 minutes shy of three hours, it held sway over the audience whenever there was blood, violence and deafening jingoism on the screen. Rest of the time people were busy talking on their phones or scrolling through Whatsapp,” wrote Suparna Sharma in her review for The Rolling Stones.
