Director Vivek Agnihotri has finally responded on Israeli director Nadav Lapid‘s recent comments about the former’s film The Kashmir Files. At Monday’s closing ceremony of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Lapid, who was serving as the president of the jury, called The Kashmir Files a ‘vulgar’ work of propaganda.
In his video statement, Agnihotri said in Hindi, “Friends, yesterday at IFFI, the jury chairman called The Kashmir Files a vulgar, propaganda film. This isn’t new for me. Urban Naxals, members of the Tukde Tukde Gang, and terrorists have been saying this for a long time. But what was surprising to me was that a terrorist’s narrative was given a platform at an event organised by the Indian government. And Indians living in India have used this narrative against their own country.”
He continued, “But who are these people. They’re the same people who’ve been calling The Kashmir Files propaganda for four years, when I first began researching it. I conducted 700 interviews for this film. Are they saying that the people that I interviewed, the people whose family members were murdered and gang-raped, are lying? A land that used to be occupied by Hindus is no longer occupied by Hindus. They’re still being killed there. Is this propaganda?”
He added, “They keep calling The Kashmir Files a propaganda film. Are they saying that the genocide of Hindus didn’t happen? Today, I challenge all the intellectuals of the world, all the Urban Naxals of the world, and even this great filmmaker from Israel, if they can prove that even one scene, one dialogue in The Kashmir Files is fictional, I will stop making films.”
Terror supporters and Genocide deniers can never silence me.
Jai Hind. #TheKashmirFiles #ATrueStory pic.twitter.com/jMYyyenflc
— Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri (@vivekagnihotri) November 29, 2022
The Kashmir Files is based on the mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus in the 90s and the film went on to make nearly Rs 350 crore worldwide.
