Friday night I went out to the 2012 LA Asia Pacific Film Festival with Byron and David (Charlie in BANG BANG) to see Valley of Saints, the festival’s Int’l Centerpiece Gala film. This thing won the World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic and split the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance, as well as appearing in a ton of world-class film festivals internationally.
It takes place in Dal Lake, an important environmental and cultural asset in the beautiful Kashmir region of Northwest India. A large population of people live in and around the lake, which dominates the activities of their daily lives. It tells the tale of Gulzar, a young working class tourist boatman, as he navigates not only the waters of Dal Lake, but his own relationship to it and to his community living there. He and his best friend Afzal plot to leave Kashmir for the lights of the big city, hoping to leave the poverty and war of Kashmir behind them. Meanwhile, Asifa, a young woman scientist, comes to the lake village to study its increasingly polluted waters. An unlikely relationship blooms between her and Gulzar, putting into clearer focus his true desires and place in life.
Valley of Saints is a gorgeous, poetic, moving narrative feature debut for writer/director Musa Syeed, a Kashmiri-American, who puts his documentary background to good use. It was shot guerilla style with a skeleton crew (producer running sound!) and first time actors on a Canon 5D. What a true testament to guerilla filmmaking; the production value and cinematography rivals many films of huger budgets, more expensive cameras, and bigger crews. In many ways, all of the parts of this film: the locale, the director (and his relationship to his ethnic homeland), the actors, guerilla filmmaking, all came together in a very specific way to create this very specific work.
Valley of Saints is one of those great cinematic gems: a simple story told simply and elegantly without getting bogged down by its own plot, yet multifaceted in its themes and subjects. It is about love, loss, friendship, responsibility, community, personal identity, family, the environment, living in civil unrest and the waters of Dal Lake. Highly recommended. See the trailer below.
