Salvatore Babones’s cryptic dig at Nadav Lapid: 'Funny… juries promote films that we find shocking, disturbing'

New Delhi: In a cryptic tweet, American sociologist and professor at University of Sydney Salvatore Babones called the ‘The Kashmir Files’ row at the IFFI 2022 ‘funny’. Reacting to protests over Israeli filmmaker and head jury of the film festival Nadav Lapid controversial remarks, said: “Film festival juries usually revel in promoting films that the rest of us find shocking and disturbing.”

Calling Vivek Agnihotri directed ‘The Kashmir Files’ a “propaganda and vulgar” film, Lapid said that he was “shocked and disturbed” by its inclusion in the competitive section.

Within a month after ‘The Kashmir Files’ released, Babones wrote an opinion about the film in which he said, ” ‘The Kashmir Files’ focuses on a particularly intense bout of Kashmiri separatist violence in 1989-1990. It bounces back and forth between that bloody episode and student elections at India’s top university. The protagonist of the film is a Hindu university student who discovers that his Kashmiri Pandit parents were killed by Muslim terrorists.”

In his piece, he called ‘The Kashmir Files’ the most controversial film in Australia, which was being screened in English in the country. Notably, the film in April this year peaked at number 5 on the Australian box office charts.

Babones, in his write-up, called Kashmir a region that is “always a religious pressure-cooker that would be controversial enough.” Talking further about the film, he said: “The violence portrayed (in the film) may be high impact, but it was real.”

“The film tells the story of the Kashmiri Pandits, not the whole troubled history of modern India…. But the writer, director and co-producer, Vivek Agnihotri, clearly intended to politicise the Pandits’ plight, and he certainly succeeded,” he added.

Nadav Lapid’s ‘controversial’ statement on ‘The Kashmir Files’

Giving his speech at the closing ceremony of the 53rd edition of IFFI in Goa, Lapid said: “I would like to thank the head of the festival and the director of the programming for the cinematic richness of the programme, for its diversity, for its complexity. It was intense. We saw seven films in the debutant competition, and 15 films in the international competition, the front window of the festival. 14 out of them had cinematic qualities, defaults and evoked vivid discussions,” Lapid said in his address.

“All of us were disturbed and shocked by the 15th film, The Kashmir Files. That felt like a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival. I feel totally comfortable openly sharing these feelings here with you at this stage. In the spirit of this festival, we can surely also accept a critical discussion, which is essential for art and life,” he added.

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