Valley of Saints (film)

Valley of Saints is a 2012 Indian film in Kashmiri language directed by Musa Syeed. Syeeds 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 amp Frank.

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 films 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 housboats over the lake and script was changed to include scenes of curfew and violence, minimum crew was used to avoid attention. ........

Source: Wikipedia