Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Shikara explores “the untold story” of Kashmiri Pandits. The trailer follows a Kashmiri Pandit couple, Shanti (Sadia) and Shiv Kumar (Aadil Khan), who are caught up in the violence of 1989-1990, when separatist groups forced the Valley’s Hindu community to abandon their homes and businesses and become refugees in Jammu and beyond. The movie will be released on February 7, alongside Malang.
Shikara is Chopra’s first release since Eklavya in 2007 (he pushed out the English-language Broken Horses in 2015). The 67-year-old filmmaker, who was born to Punjabi parents and raised in Srinagar, has previously directed Mission Kashmir (2000), which revolved around the Kashmiri insurgency.
Shikara has an original score by AR Rahman and Qutub-E-Kripa and music by Sandesh Shandilya and Abhay Sopori. The screenplay is by Chopra, Rahul Pandita and Abhijat Joshi. Pandita wrote the acclaimed memoir Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir in 2013.
The plight of the Kashmiri Pandit community has been previously explored by Ashoke Pandit in his 2004 film Sheen. The Tashkent Files director Vivek Agnihotri has also announced that he will be directing The Kashmir Files, which will be “the unreported story” of the “wrenching genocide of Kashmiri Hindus”.
Also read:
‘The river of my lost village’: A Kashmiri Pandit remembers his small but historic village of Akura
Kashmir’s exiled Pandits don’t know what to go back to – even if they do eventually return
