A Coming Of Age Story
Under Military Occupation
An animated hybrid documentary that tells a coming-of-age story of a reluctant revolutionary Kashmiri artist and hipster fashionista Mir Suhail, who paints his way into the Kashmiri Muslim uprising for freedom—and into the crosshairs of competing power players. Now an immigrant in the U.S., he uses his art as a weapon of resistance— challenging censorship, confronting occupation, and redefining what it means to fight for freedom across borders.
Synopsis
Kashmiri artist Mir Suhail's androgynous style makes a bold statement in his mountain homeland of Kashmir. Known as the land of beautiful sweaters, Kashmir is caught between India's brutal military occupation and a grassroots struggle for freedom. This Himalayan mountain valley is a police state in the world’s most populous democracy.
But even a fashion influencer cannot escape his identity as a Kashmiri Muslim, and when the political becomes personal, Mir must choose between making art to escape the occupation or harnessing it to resist the occupation.
As India’s ruling BJP government revokes Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy, the Kashmiri independence movement is crushed.
Mir is a willfully apolitical fashionista who navigates curfews, checkpoints, and military identification parades, as he makes art, gets high, and falls in love—narrowly escaping military violence and also conscription into the armed rebellion. Mir rejects the traditional codes of masculinity underpinning both the occupation and Kashmiri resistance.
Now a refugee in the United States, Mir grapples with the trauma of exile and the dislocation of diaspora. He struggles to find his place in a new cultural landscape, where identity is both fluid and highly politicized. Freed from immediate censorship but haunted by surveillance, Mir begins to reimagine his art—and his role as an activist in Queens.
Mir discovers a new kind of freedom—not just to speak, but to build solidarity across movements, from Kashmir to Black Lives Matter to Palestinian liberation.
His evolution is not just political, but deeply personal: the story of a once-apolitical dreamer who becomes a global voice for justice, redefining what it means to be an artist, a Muslim, and a Kashmiri in a fractured world. His sketchbooks, once a refuge, have become blueprints for imagining freedom beyond borders.
Kashmiri Resistance Slogan
Hum kya chahte? Azadi!
Zara zor se bolo – Azadi
Hai hak hamara – Azadi!
Hum cheen ke lenge – Azadi!
Khushboo wali – Azadi!
Hai jaan se pyari – Azadi!
Aye moula dede – Azadi!
Shodah ke sadkey – Azadi!
Mein marr bhi Jaaun toh, mera kafan pe likhna – Azadi!
Aayee, aayee – Azaadi!
What do we want? Freedom!
Say it loudly – Freedom!
It is our right – Freedom!
We will snatch it for ourselves – Freedom!
The fragrant one – Freedom!
More precious than life – Freedom!
Oh! Almighty grant us – Freedom!
For the sacrifices of martyrs – Freedom!
If I become a martyr, write on my shrouds – Freedom!
Here she comes – Freedom