Kashmir has a landscape, stories and talent of its own. The government should now build a cinema for Kashmiris first, and the world after.
Kashmir does not lack material. Its landscape has drawn cameras for over a century. Its history, culture and people offer stories that no borrowed script can match. What Kashmir has lacked is the will to turn this raw material into a cinema of its own.
That is changing, slowly. The valley now has a fund that helps filmmakers make films. This is no small thing. Independent cinema is expensive, and support of this kind can turn an idea into a finished work. It has already helped some.
There is proof that this works. Kashmiri filmmakers, writers and technicians have shown, again and again, that they can do good work. Some have taken their films to Cannes, Venice, Sundance and Busan. Others have built quieter, steady careers within the valley itself. None of this happened by chance. It happened because people had stories to tell, and, in some cases, the means to tell them. A script by a Kashmir author led to the making of one of the impressive films on migration and Covid, which was appreciated and awarded at Cannes Film Festival.
There is also an audience. The appetite to watch Kashmir, told by Kashmiris, is real and it is large. People want to see their own streets, their own winters, their own histories on screen, not as a backdrop borrowed by outsiders, but as the subject itself.
And yet, look at where the big money still goes. The recent film festival was a capital-intensive affair, built largely to sell Kashmir’s landscape to filmmakers who are not from here. It was, in its own way, a success. It drew attention. But attention is not the same as an industry.
The government would do well to ask a harder question. Why not take the film route to build a cinema economy of its own? Not one built mainly to attract outside productions, but one built first for Kashmir’s own audience, and only then for the world.
This is not an argument against festivals or against inviting outside filmmakers. Both have their place. But an industry cannot be built on visitors alone. It needs local writers, local directors, local crews and local audiences, all supported consistently, not through one grand event, but through sustained investment.
Kashmir has the stories. It has some of the talent. It has an audience hungry to watch its own reflection. What it needs now is a government willing to treat cinema not as a tourism strategy, but as an industry worth building from within.
