Chopra opens exhibition of Kashmir photos taken during Sikandar shoot

Ace film-maker Vidhu Vinod Chopra inaugurated an exhibition of photographs of scenic Jammu and Kashmir taken during the filming of Sikandar, a film written and directed by Piyush Jha and produced by Big Pictures, here yesterday.

The film is scheduled to be released on August 21 across 265 screens in India, the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The rights of the film have been sold in Israel, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. The film was recently screened at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and at the Stuttgart Film Festival.

The entire cast of Sikandar was present at the opening of the photo exhibition, including R Madhavan, Sanjay Suri, Parzaan Dastur, Ayesha Kapur and debutant Arunuday Singh. Also present were Jha and producer Sudhir Mishra.

The exhibition will be on till August 23, a press release from Big Pictures, a part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, said.

Sikandar, shot on location in Kashmir with a running time of 110 minutes, is about a 14-year-old Kashmiri boy's desire to play football but whose life-track changes when he stumbles upon a gun one day.

Chopra, a Kashmiri himself, has shot two of his films in the valley. "I made Khamosh more than two decades ago and I again revisited the valley for Mission Kashmir in 2000. So much has changed between this period, and yet much is still the same. I am glad that, along with Sikandar, this photo exhibition will bring to the fore the idea that Kashmir is indeed paradise on Earth, and this paradise is in our own country," he said.

Mahesh Ramanathan, Chief Operating Officer, Big Pictures, said the exhibition would remind cinema lovers and film-makers that the beauty of Kashmir was unsullied by the ravages of inimical forces. "Sikandar also will remind film makers of the evergreen film hits of the past that were shot extensively in Kashmir. After the release of Sikandar, hopefully more producers will return to patronise this film maker's paradise," he remarked.

Director Jha said, "After I set the story in Kashmir, the visual metaphor I strived for, was to contrast the beauty of 'Mother Nature', against the cruelty of human nature. Actually, Sikandar is a film which could be set anywhere – as it deals with the universal manipulation of adolescence by the nasty games played by adults. Having said that, I'd like to add that, Sikandar is not at all a preachy film. It is an exciting suspense thriller with its heart in the right place,"

Jha added that his actors – Parzaan and Ayesha – had shown that a typical adult hero and heroine were not necessarily the only ingredients for a film to sell. "Both Parzaan and Ayesha have done a stupendous job and this proves that a film can surely be successful with 14-year-olds as protagonists, without it being termed as a 'children's film '," he said.

The photo exhibition is a wide-arrayed display of picturesque photographs taken during the 40-day shoot of Sikandar and features snow-capped mountains, tall chinar trees, pristine waters of the Chenab, soldiers at frequent check posts on every road, wooden houses and bridges that form the fabric of the daily life of most Kashmiris.

The photographs were taken by Location Still Photographer Pramod Gawade, Production Designer Shruti Gupte, Ayesha Kapur's mother Jacqueline Kapur and Jha himself.

NNN