Simone Mestroni

After prayers is a documentary about Kashmir’s conflict narrated through life stories, about the way the dream of independence as well as the nightmare of violence are brought forward through the emotional life of common people. The traumatic memories of a young activist and of a victim of the first army crackdown in the valley will take us to the resistance practice of Kanijung, the ritual stone-pelting where local teenagers and Indian military forces fight each other after Friday’s prayers. The story of a mujahideen involved in the early stages of guerrilla warfare and his dramatic developments leads us deeply into the emotional scale of the separatist ideology. The voice of a mother who lost her son during recent riots evokes the importance of pain and resentment in the reproduction of the conflict into the family dimension and in the moral economy of Islam. The narrative flow of different stories aims to thematically reconnect around the structural role of martyrdom in the revolving of Kashmiri politics, along with the sublime and controversial utopia of independence, as well as the miseries of the conflict.