Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Shikara gets ringing endorsement from Avatar director James Cameron: ‘A masterpiece’
Filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra‘s upcoming film, Shikara, has been endorsed by none other than Avatar and Titanic director, James Cameron. Towards the end of the latest teaser of the film, a blurb by Cameron calling Shikara ‘a masterpiece’ is shown.
Cameron, along with another Oscar-winning filmmaker, Alfonso Cuaron, previously endorsed Chopra’s Hollywood film, Broken Horses.
Shikara tells the story of over 400,000 Hindu refugees, who were forced to flee the Kashmir valley after the breakout of insurgency in the early 90s. Chopra, himself a Kashmiri Pandit, has said that Shikara is more than just a film, “It is a movement.”
The film stars newcomers Sadia as Shanti Dhar and Aadil Khan as Shiv Kumar Dhar. Chopra also flew in approximately 4000 Pandits to shoot a key scene set in a refugee camp. “It’s a tribute to the Pandit community, to us, to our mothers. Nobody listened to us for 30 years. Our story was hidden for the past 30 years,” the director said at a recent event.
Speaking about his personal connection to the story, he told PTI, "This is completely personal to me. It is my life. Just think about the scale of this tragedy. It is unbelievable to me that we have let it happen. My mother thought she will go back after two-three weeks or after few months or next year but she couldn't go back and that smile slowly vanished."