One on One: Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi
What is the true test of friendship? The Insider asked Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi, two friends turned co-directors, about their personal and political odyssey.
"It was the first time in my sheltered American experience of seeing hatred to the point of people wanting to hurt each other."
- Project Kashmir co-director Geeta Patel
- Project Kashmir co-director Geeta Patel
What is the true test of friendship? Travelling together in a war-torn country? Sharing a houseboat for eight weeks? Discovering your religious differences in the back seat of a car? Editing your film in a single-wide trailer in the mountains of Utah? Co-directors Geeta Patel and Senain Kheshgi took their friendship to a new level when they journeyed to Kashmir to document the horrors of a country they are both indelibly connected to. Geeta, a Hindu, and Senain, a Muslim, turned the cameras on themselves as they faced their own burgeoning conflicts while trying to uncover the thorny truth behind a 60-year conflict. In addition to being supported by the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, Geeta and Senain attended the 2006 Sundance Institute Documentary Editing, Composer, and Producing Labs and they recently returned to Utah to screen their film Project Kashmir at the Park City Library as part of the newly launched Sundance Institute Film Series. The Insider asked the pair about their global odyssey and the new friends they made along the way.
Insider: How did you arrive at the idea for this project?
Geeta: I was working on a novel set in Kashmir and I realized there was little information about Kashmir. I knew Senain through an arts organization in Los Angeles and I approached her and said I'm going to go to Kashmir to do research, so can you teach me how to use a camera?
Senain: I had just finished working with Davis Guggenheim on The First Year, which I produced and I was looking for my next project. I wanted to direct... so when Geeta called I thought this was the perfect opportunity for a film. I'm originally from Pakistan and she's from India and we could go together to Kashmir to ask questions in a place where our two countries have been fighting. I said let's do this as a Hindi and a Muslim together and she said, "Who's the Muslim?" It wasn't part of our dialogue because we were just Americans, but as soon as we got to Kashmir it became the primary trajectory of our experience.
Geeta: Senain and I come from communities that are divided over the subject of Kashmir. Unlike with Israel and Palestine, Darfur, and Northern Ireland there are very few organizations that have dialogues about what is happening in Kashmir to bring awareness to the lives of people in that conflict zone. Right when we started working on this, there was a UCLA conference on Kashmir that was really rare. It was all South Asians, middle-to-upper class, talking about Waldorf Schools and checking their cell phones. They start the conference and the room splits. People were going fist to fist about the origin of the conflict in Kashmir. One side was Muslim and one side was Hindu. They had to call security. It was the first time in my sheltered American experience of seeing hatred to the point of people wanting to hurt each other.
Insider: Was your primary purpose to inform people in the U.S. about Kashmir or to create a global dialogue?
Senain: It's global. We made it for our communities of Indians and Pakistani in the Diaspora. But we wanted it to be a universal story about conflict and conflict resolution. We found on the ground that part of the healing process is being able to acknowledge each other's pain. Our friendship is incorporated into this story because we started to fall into our own prejudices and biases against the other. How do you argue or solve problems when you are fundamentally affected by conflict?
Insider: At what point in Kashmir did it become a test of your friendship?
Geeta: It was immediate. We wanted people to feel and not think and to understand viscerally why emotion directs the violence and divide. It's not a logical process and this is a universal thing about conflict. Generations of pain, such as: "You killed my mother so how can I look at you?" That's emotional. One of the common things in this war zone was that everything was about politics and identity... because that's how their everyday lives are framed. They are always being stopped at check points and being judged if they are Muslim or Hindu.
Senain: When I first came to Kashmir I was feeling very isolated after September 11 in the states being Pakistani and Muslim. People in Kashmir were willing to die for their homeland and their identity and here I am in America not able to hold my head up and say loudly that I am a Muslim. Geeta didn't have those feelings at the beginning, but as we went through our own rabbit hole of biases, slowly I started to feel more comfortable and Geeta started to feel more isolated.
Insider: What was more challenging for you: filming in Kashmir or coming back and editing this personal footage?
Senain: Definitely the editing. The filmmaking was scary and we had a lot of intense moments... but we were really challenging ourselves to push our own feelings and we disagreed on a lot of the politics. We would look at one scene and we would both see it completely differently.
Geeta: What we were trying to do to the arc of each character was to peel away the layers and show how the war affected their human condition and leave you with someone who is truly a hero for keeping it going and trying to stop the war. But also for someone who is completely broken down. That did not come to life in their actions on screen, so it took two years to edit because we had to create that arc. We showed the film to Aarti [Tikoo], one of the characters in the film, and she said, "I didn't know you guys knew me so well." That meant so much.
Senain: Many documentary filmmakers have that problem of trying to represent someone's entirety from scenes. It was even harder for us to do this for ourselves. There were things we could shy away from if we wanted. We are certainly not perfect in this movie and we left things that made us seem insensitive, vulnerable, and naive so we could challenge the viewer to confront how they would deal with such an immense conflict.
Insider: What has been your experience coming through the Sundance Labs, working with the Documentary Program through the years, and now returning to Utah to screen your film?
Senain: Working with the Institute is not about getting a check. That's helpful and wonderful, but what has been amazing about this experience is that we have gained a family. It is much deeper than a friendship. It's this great respect for the knowledge and care given to so many projects and you can see how everyone at Sundance takes on a film and makes it their own. Ten years from now when we are making another film that relationship is going to be there.
Geeta: Going to the Labs was where this film really happened for us: first-time filmmakers in the middle of hell trying to edit their films with people dedicated to the same effort. After the first day we went to the Owl Bar that night and another filmmaker, Cary Fukunaga, who had been there longer asked, "Have you cried yet?" I looked at him and I had literally cried on my way down to the Owl Bar because I didn't think we had a movie. We had just gotten torn apart. A few days later I cried again because I knew we had a movie and it was going to be better than we ever thought. It was one of the most pivotal experiences we've had as filmmakers.
Learn more about the Sundance Institute Documentary Program.
