Ali Emran and the Rise of a New Kashmiri Cinema

From forgotten downtown alleys to international festivals, the Srinagar-based filmmaker blends mysticism, memory, and meaning to reshape South Asian independent cinema.

- Fiza Masoodi

In a modest Srinagar neighborhood not far from the bustle of Lal Chowk, a Kashmiri filmmaker is building a cinematic universe.

Ali Emran, 42, doesn’t chase fame. He seeks something else: meaning.

And ina region like Kashmir, where art often wrestles with history, identity, and silence, meaning matters.

Emran’s films feel like they remember. They remember the weight of tradition, the softness of spiritual longing, and the wounds that remain just beneath the skin of everyday life.

His stories are shaped by Kashmir, but they speak far beyond it, to anyone who has ever searched for selfhood in a world that often denies it.

In 2006, when Emran released his first short film, The Ninth Act, the idea of a Kashmiri making independent films felt distant.

The film was experimental, unsettling, and full of questions. That was the point.

Since then, his work has moved through genres and languages, from mystical fiction to documentary, from Kashmiri to Urdu, but his preoccupations have remained constant: the soul, the self, and the society around it.

Last year, he made history.

On October 4, 2024, Emran’s feature film Qouluf: The Ensorcelled became the first Kashmiri-language film to screen ina local cinema hall in more than sixty years.

The screening, held at Inox Srinagar, drew diverse audiences: young cinephiles, old-school artists, students of literature, and even those who had never seen a Kashmiri film on the big screen.

“People cried,” Emran recalled. “They heard their mother tongue in a dark theatre and it felt like coming home.”