The documentary “Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves Its Trail)” will be shown at Cal State San Bernardino on Monday, Nov. 13, with a question-and-answer session with its director, Iffat Fatima, following the film.

Presented by CSUSB’s Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and co-sponsored by the CSUSB Department of History and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the film will be shown at University Hall, room UH-106, beginning at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Parking at CSUSB is $6.

“Khoon Diy Baarav” captures the Muslim majority's struggles for their voices to be heard in Kashmir through a story on state actions taken on those who protested for self-determination.

The documentary “enters the vexed political scenario in Kashmir through the lives of families of the victims of enforced disappearances,” the film’s synopsis says. “It is a non-sequential account of personal narratives and reminiscences ruptured by violence, undermined by erasure and over-ridden by official documents that challenge truth.

“Opening out the real and the human as against the abstract and the brutal, the film seeks to confront advocates of amnesia in Kashmir as well as in other conflict zones,” the synopsis continues. “It questions the militaristic approach to resolve political problems, by which communities and lives within it get invaded and destroyed, even as it shatters personal dreams and desires.”

“In addition to watching this moving documentary, we are very fortunate to have an activist and a filmmaker from Kashmir tell us about her personal experience in the region,” said Isabel Huacuja Alonso, an assistant professor in CSUSB’s history department.

Fatima, who also wrote and produced the film, is an independent documentary filmmaker and researcher from Kashmir, based in Delhi, India. Since 2006 she has worked in Kashmir on the issue of enforced disappearances in collaboration with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), a collective of the family members of the victims of enforced disappearances in Kashmir campaigning for information on the whereabouts of their disappeared kin.

In 2011, she made a short film, “Where Have You Hidden My New Crescent Moon,” on enforced disappearances. “Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves its Trail)” was released in 2015. In April-May 2016, she worked on the audio visual design for an exhibition, “Gold Dust of Begum Sultans” at The Indira Gandhi National Centre for The Arts, New Delhi. 

In 2015 she co-edited a compendium, “Bread Beauty Revolution, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987).” In 2004, she completed a fellowship, Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts, at Brandeis University in Boston, Mass. In 2001, Fatima was awarded the Asia Fellowship for her work in Sri Lanka, “Inter-communal Relations and Education: The Sri Lankan Experience.”

Her films include, “Lanka — The Other Side of War and Peace,” on the history of overlapping conflicts in Sri Lanka; “The Kesar Saga,” on storytelling in Ladakh; “In the Realm of the Visual,” on one of India’s most prolific and versatile artist and designer, Dashrath Patel; “Boojh Sakey to Boojh,” on the contemporary understanding of the 13th-century Sufi poet and scholar Amir Khusro. 

Her video installation, “Ethnography of a European City: Conversations in Salzburg,” questions some of the assumptions in the east vs. west polarity/dichotomy/disparity.

For more information and accommodations, please contact Isabel Huacuja Alonso at (909) 537-4326 or iha@csusb.edu.

Visit the CSUSB Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies website at http://cimes.csusb.edu for more information on its programs.