It’s a lovely winter morning in Kashmir when Haleema meets her close friend Tara. As the two women sit down to chat, share a moment and eventually go about the town, arm in arm with each other, a bond marked by intimacy and deep affection is conjured for the viewer. 
The tonality and writing is deliberately suffused with warmth and an uplifting delineation of a friendship. However, tragedy is swift to strike, and in this sudden reversal of fortune, the narrative offers its core message to the viewer. 
Without meandering into overt sentimentalism, the film presents its comment on the mindlessness of a form of violence that is executed in the name of imagined boundaries of religion and communal differences. The vagaries of life are put under question, as the hope, and the voice which stood for it, is silenced with a brutal act of cruelty. The storytelling, and performance both show earnestness, thereby, allowing the film lucidity in communicating its message to you.

The Good News | Short Film Nominee

An idyllic space marked by shikaras, roses, adornment and smiles constitute the world of the film at first glance. At the heart of this narrative is a loving father-daughter equation, and a kind doctor who visits them regularly for follow-ups. However, this realm of love and longing is soon disrupted as tragedy strikes, following a shooting in a marketplace. 

By tying matters of the heart, and the ensuing complications, with the terrible reality of Kashmir that gets embroiled in the turbulent political terrain of the region, the film also presents the darkness of what lies beneath the surface of the Valley’s spectacular beauty. As foiled expectations, the motif of a red flower, tenderness of a hurt heart all make their presence felt, the film comes into its own. Though the narrative sometimes runs the danger of a little laxity, the end result remains especially notable in its visual progression and the performances it brings to life.

My Father's Doctor | Short Film Nominee

Set against the hinterland of a Kashmir divided on religious lines, the film tells the story of inter-faith lovers. Attempting to invoke a poetic approach in the narrative, supplemented by a strong performance by Neelofar Hamid, Gaash is about Fatima, a Kashmiri Muslim, falling in love with a Hindu man. The film opens with the sight of a group of men carrying a coffin in the snow. A parallel story is unfolding inside the coffin as a woman metaphorically awaits her life after death and the subsequent liberation from all man-made restrictions and inhibitions that kept her from her one true love. The plot attempts a comment on a society that is fraught by religious differences, misogyny, patriarchy and the complete obliteration of a woman's voice, along with the idea of love eventually surmounting all of these odds.

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