How We Celebrate Freedom

In 2007, as India celebrates its 60th anniversary of Independence, this provocative and quietly disturbing new film raises questions about freedom in Kashmir. As the Kashmiri people begin to look within their ledger of loss, in the aftermath of 18 years of armed conflict, this film pries open the difficult meanings of their struggle and the varying degrees of freedom in India. Using a blend of cinema verite style footage, rare archival material, and poetry, this film is an engaging look at contemporary Indian democracy, and a reflection on power, resistance and "freedom's terrible thirst". Combining several modes of expression to evoke the past, the present is simultaneously unraveled. The camera witnesses an ageing father in the Martyrs Graveyard; a group of men surveying the dead in the mountain villages of Bandipora; the Out Patients' ward of the Government Psychiatric Hospital in Srinagar; the satirical farce of Bhand folk performers as they play in a village square; and the tense undercurrents of an Army Sadhbhavna camp in north Kashmir. Other striking images are conjured by the writing of contemporary Kashmiri poets. Shot and edited between August 2004-2006 How We Celebrate Freedom engages us with the idea of Azadi, freedom from India, in Kashmir. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)