JOIN US‘Hamid’: For both widowed Kashmiri and Army man's wife
When ‘Hamid’ released in Bengaluru, most media organisations gave it the usual space reserved for “festival films”. The film was quick to vacate these spaces, as well as a few theatres in the city that it occupied, to others that came with a lot more money and hullabaloo.
Anyone going by this wouldn’t have expected the sort of response it got in Mangaluru at the NITTE International Film Festival.
It wasn’t so much the fact that the house was full, but how the house reacted, that was striking. At the end of two hours, many eyes were moist; one grown man was sobbing. At a talk after the screening of the film with director Aijaz Khan, people were not just congratulating him, they were saying thank you.
A film about Kashmir is a dangerous thing to make today. If the film does not wear patriotism on its sleeve, people are going to tear it apart “tukde tukde”. But Hamid makes an impact among common people (and not just the intelligentsia in its ivory towers) even without the token nods to jingoism. One of the most memorable moments during the interaction was when the wife of an Army man got up to say, “I always knew what this side of the story was; you showed me what the other side is.”
‘Hamid’ tells the story of a young boy whose father disappears amid the high state of tension in the Valley. This is not news to anyone but the family because they live in a time and a place when it is common for fathers and brothers to go missing.
Who does Hamid and his mother have now? The little fellow finds the perfect solution: through reliable sources, he gets hold of the phone number of someone who is quite famous for being kind and merciful: Allah.
Unfortunately, for the boy, the number is not Allah’s but that of an Army man, that too one who looks particularly unkindly upon those fighting for the Kashmir cause.
What follows are scenes that will weigh heavily upon your chest.
Hamid is not a film that plays to your fears, or to the gallery; it does not ask any grand questions; it is not pretentious to offer super-simple and tailor-made solutions.
Hamid is about a simple boy’s naive interrogation of a god (it doesn’t matter which one) whose miracles most of us don’t believe in anymore. Hamid is who we once were, or who we hope our children remain, though we know that’s not going to happen.
We grew up when we realised miracles don’t happen; Hamid demands them from no less than the almighty himself but must realise what we have all realised.
‘Hamid’ has one of the most perfect pitches an Indian political film has ever made. You’d have to dig very deep to find a political stand, even then you are likely to return empty-handed.
Its politics stays in a realm of existential questions and a call for humanism. It strips people whom we know only by their politically charged identities — soldiers, widowed women, orphaned children — and reveals them as solitary beings who are content without ostentatious pleasures as long as they have the bare minimum and the right people.
This very reason may prompt some to call Hamid a “safe” film. It’s true that ‘Hamid’ does not make a call for action, but a call for action will only be heard by those on your own side of the fence, or, at best, those sitting on it. Fences don’t exist for ‘Hamid’; it’s as much a film for a widowed Kashmiri mother as it is for a soldier’s wife.