Alipur Films - Inshallah Football (2010)

‘Kashmiri teenagers in the early 90’s did not imitate Che Guevara and Malcolm X; militants walking the ramp of war determined the fashion trends’ Basharat Peer, author of ‘Curfewed Night.’

Flicking his cigarette, Bashir gazes into the camera with eyes that have seen worlds shattered “I was petrified that he would lose sanity, follow my footsteps and become a militant”. Bashir Baba, a leader of the armed group Hizbul Mujahideen has now given-up the gun, but when he left his home to for the training camps of Pakistan, in the early 90’s, his son Basharat was two months old.

Basharat Baba belongs to a new generation of Kashmiris. He has grown up under the shadow of a silent war. His is the conflict generation, unfamiliar with what ‘normal’ should be. Yet, within it, football is his passion and fuel. For the past three years, Juan Marcos Troia, an Argentinean football coach, with his wife Priscilla, themselves bridging a great cultural divide, have revitalised Basharat’s life through their ISAT football academy, which also runs an exchange program to Brazil for talented players. Basharat is selected to go to Brazil, to play in the land of Pele. But Basharat has been refused a passport by the Government of India.

His crime? That he was born the son of a militant.

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