I watched Line of Control in the din of a Manhattan afternoon. The film itself belongs to another world entirely: mist, barbed wire, mountain breeze, and the uneasy calmness that settles over a place watched too long by soldiers and ghosts. Written and directed by Travis Hodgkins, and based on The Collaborator (Penguin, 2011) by my friend Mirza Waheed, the film carries the burden of that landscape with surprising tenderness.
To adapt Kashmir for the screen is already a dangerous act. To adapt The Collaborator - a novel haunted by memory, shame, complicity, and survival - is perhaps impossible from the outset. However, perhaps that impossibility gives the film its terrible beauty. In almost every frame, one senses not mastery over the material, but an effort to hold together something constantly threatening to fall apart.
After watching the film, I wrote to producer Rashaana Shah to ask about its making. She replied that beyond every frame, something was falling apart. Locations collapsed, budgets thinned, and there were innumerable searches for faces, songs, and landscapes.
The production moved between the Gurez Valley near the Line of Control and distant locations in Tbilisi, Georgia. They searched for a geography capable of carrying Kashmir’s emotional weather. Once I read her note, the film altered in my mind. What I had first taken for excessive composure came to feel like resistance against disappearance itself.
A Land of Shrinking Alternatives
There are moments when the film finds its beat completely. The recruitment scene, in which Captain Kadian draws the young collaborator into his orbit, is gripping precisely because it avoids theatricality. Coercion arrives conversationally, through the narrowing of options. Here, the film understands something essential about Kashmir: the most dangerous weapon is often not the gun, but the shrinking of alternatives.
Rudi Dharmalingam gives Captain Kadian disturbing intelligence. The role could easily have slipped into caricature. Instead, he plays him as a man educated just enough to become dangerous to himself and others.
In the captain’s quarters hangs a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and the irony is almost unbearable. Nonviolence presides over violence. The captain himself, with his fractured pronunciation of “lit—ray—ture,” performs education without inhabiting its moral weight. For him, literature is something to mock gently before returning to the business of control.
Lingering Grief That Burns Slowly
The film moves slowly. At first, I resisted this. I wanted roughness, the suddenness through which violence enters ordinary life. However, gradually, the pacing revealed another intention: the refusal to let suffering become consumable. Modern cinema often races through devastation and converts hurt into momentum. Line of Control does the opposite. It lingers and waits. It asks us to remain inside discomfort longer than we might wish.
The valley itself is filmed with extraordinary attention to detail. Forsythia blooms yellow against hillsides while bodies lie in fields below. Under another director, such juxtapositions might feel decorative. Here, they become part of Kashmir’s duplicity: beauty persisting beside ruin, spring arriving indifferent to history.
There are traces of older tragedies throughout the film. After a bus bomb blast, a soldier carries the body of Asma, played with luminous restraint by Anastasia Jairath. It reminded me unexpectedly of Lear holding Cordelia, as grief escapes politics and becomes elemental. Later, a skull lifted in the field inevitably summons Hamlet and Yorick. These associations are risky, yet the film wears them lightly, as though literature itself has drifted into the valley and refuses to leave.
One scene unsettled me deeply: the ‘collaborator’ gathering wood for the cremation of a Muslim fighter. In Kashmir, the dead are returned to the earth quietly, wrapped in prayer and soil. Fire feels alien there, almost like a second disappearance. Moreover, this is in a place where the ground itself is burdened with memory. Here, one hears again and again of unnamed graves and bodies folded silently into the land. The valley remembers.
The political life of Kashmir enters the film obliquely, through fragments. “Go Back” appears half-erased on walls. Speech itself arrives fractured.
And then, amidst all this, a transistor plays “main ye sochkar uske dar se utha tha,” lyrics by Kaifi Azmi. The song does not feel inserted; it feels remembered. For a moment, the valley speaks in its own voice.
Between Memory and Erasure
What remains after the film ends is not shock or resolution, but atmosphere. Lives are suspended between memory and erasure. One finally realizes that certain films emerging from Kashmir are carried across difficult terrain. They are assembled against exhaustion, against forgetting, against the steady erosion of witness itself.
Perhaps that is why the film’s 117 minutes linger beyond their runtime.
Not because Line of Control explains Kashmir, but because it allows the valley to breathe beside us again.
The film is currently available to stream on Apple TV and YouTube Movies, with both Hindi-dubbed and English original versions.
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