Valley of Saints

Valley of Saints (2012)

Widely considered to be the crown jewel of Kashmir, Dal Lake is a sprawling aquatic community where erupting political violence often distracts from the natural beauty. Gulzar, a young, working-class boatman, plans to skip town with his best friend in search of a better life, but a weeklong military curfew derails their departure. Forced to wait it out, Gulzar takes a job assisting a pretty scientist named Asifa. As they navigate the floating landscape, collecting water samples for an environmental study, an unlikely relationship blossoms between the two. When Asifa’s research reveals harmful pollutants, Gulzar realizes that the ecology of the lake and an entire way of life face an alarming threat, and everything in his own life begins to take on a new hue.

Date of release
2012-01-23
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 22m
Genres
Drama
Director
Musa Syeed

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance Film Festival - Audience Award – Best Foreign Feature Film; Alfred P. Sloan Prize

Valley of Saints is a 2012 Indian film in Kashmiri language directed by Musa Syeed. Syeed's directorial debut is a romantic film set in Dal Lake, Srinagar, which also raises an environmental issue surrounding the lake. It won the Sundance Film Festival World Dramatic Audience Award in 2012. It tied for the Alfred P. Sloan Prize with the American film Robot & Frank.

Development and production

The director of the film, Musa Syeed, grew up in US, where his father had migrated in the 1970s, after being a political prisoner in Kashmir. Sayeed visited Kashmir in 2009 and stayed for a year, living at a houseboat on Dal lake, gathering information and developing film ideas, eventually he set the film around the Dal lake, as an allegory for Kashmir.

He first cast a local boatman, Gulzar Bhat, as the film's lead, followed by Mohammed Afzal and Neelofar Hamid, who play lead roles in the film. The film was shot during uprising of 2010, where much of the area was under curfew, and crew stayed on houseboats over the lake and script was changed to include scenes of curfew and violence, minimum crew was used to avoid attention.

The film is scored by NY based indie alternative/rock band Zerobridge's Mubashir Mohi-ud-din, J. P. Bowersock, and also features songs like 'Nightingale's Lament (Gulzar Bhat)' rendering poetry of Rasul Mir, and the song 'Boulevard' penned by Makhanlal Bekas.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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