My earliest childhood memory of Kashmir is of my cousins and I playing with our grandmother by the Jhelum River near our houseboat beneath Zero Bridge. Every summer my father brought my mother and I to Kashmir to visit his family. When the war broke in 1989, the visits stopped. Years passed before I went back to reconnect with my relatives.

Then, after multiple trips, I eventually decided to make a film in Kashmir because I found that none of the outside voices describing it accurately captured people’s daily experiences. I thought that a film introducing the lives of a few Kashmiri citizens and their common hopes and fears would show their humanity more intimately than the usual Western documentaries on the Kashmir Situation or the Bollywood products that treat it purely as an exotic backdrop.