‘Going public and targeting a particular film is unethical’: IFFI jury member Sudipto Sen

On December 3, the International Film Festival of India’s foreign jury members issued a statement saying they stood by jury chief Nadav Lapid’s criticism of the film The Kashmir Files. 

Jinko Gotoh, Pascale Chavance and Javier Angulo Barturen also said it “saddens us greatly to see the festival platform being used for politics and subsequent personal attacks on Nadav”.

During IFFI’s closing ceremony, Lapid had said the entire jury was “disturbed and shocked” by The Kashmir Files, which “felt to us like propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section in such a prestigious film festival”. His comments received widespread criticism, including from Israel’s ambassador to India. The remaining jury member, Sudipto Sen, had tweeted on November 29 that Lapid’s comments on Kashmir Files “was completely his personal opinion”.

On Friday, a day before his fellow jury members issued this statement, Sen told Newslaundry he “didn’t disassociate” from his fellow jury members.

“We judged 22 films and gave awards to five. It means we rejected 17 films and the reasons to reject those films were unanimous,” he said. These reasons were a “closed-door affair”. “In public forums, we always discuss the films that have been awarded, not the films we have rejected…Going public and targeting a particular film that was rejected is unethical. When we are not giving the reasons to reject 16 films, then why do we have to give reasons to reject a particular film?” 

Sen said it was “politically motivated” to pinpoint a particular film and “say something which is not supposed to be known by others”.

“As a filmmaker, we use words like pretentious, motivated, unethical, technically wrong, etc. But we don’t use words like vulgar, propaganda,” he said. “I did not disassociate myself from my fellow jury members. But I say we have not given awards to Kashmir Files. Why we haven’t given an award is absolutely closed door, and I don’t agree about going in public and picking on a particular film.”

It should be noted that Sen is the director of The Kerala Story, which purports to tell the story of 32,000 girls from Kerala who were “forcibly converted” to Islam and inducted into ISIS. These claims were debunked by Alt News as being based on “misquotes”, “flawed math”, and “imaginary figures”.

But what ails The Kashmir Files? Read two reviews in Newslaundry – here and here – to find out.