Frames per Second: Indeed, 'All of Kashmir is a prison, my friends'

Vishal Bharadwaj's Haider makes an appeal for peace by eschewing a politics of violence and revenge

Haider (Shahid Kapoor), the protagonist in Vishal Bharadwaj’s eponymous adaptation (2014) of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, returns home to Srinagar from Aligarh, where he is a student, after the arrest and “disappearance” of his father, Dr Hilal Meer (Narendra Jha). He finds his hometown under a curfew imposed by the Indian Army and the constant threat of militancy and terror attacks in the air. He tells his friends, Salman and Salman (Sunil Kaul and Rajat Bhagat) — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — that he is determined to find his father. “Where? In camps?” they ask him. “In prisons?” Haider replies: “All of