When Muzaffar and Shaad Ali Wove Time into Story at IFFI
By Gajanan Khergamker
At the International Film Festival of India, a quiet kind of magic unfurled on stage—an uncommon moment when two eras of Indian cinema didn’t just meet, but mirrored each other. In a deeply personal conversation, legendary filmmaker Muzaffar Ali and his son, acclaimed director Shaad Ali, opened a window into their shared world of images, memories, and inherited artistry. The session, fittingly titled 'Cinema and Culture: Reflections from Two Eras' became less a discussion and more a recollection of lineage, longing, and creative legacy.
Following a warm introduction by filmmaker Ravi Kottarakara, Shaad Ali slipped into the role of both interviewer and son, gently guiding his father through the terrain of his life, his struggles, and the visions that shaped his cinema.
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| Muzaffar and Shaad Ali interacting with the audience |
Shaad’s first question set the tone. What had young Muzaffar Ali wanted to be, before cinema claimed him? The answer carried the fragrance of an old studio: paint-splattered afternoons, winning art competitions, and lines of poetry scribbled into notebooks.
Cinema came later, Muzaffar Ali explained, almost like an unexpected refuge - a place large enough to hold all the restive images in his mind. Film, for him, was where imagination could finally shake off the “predictable imagery” that dominated mainstream narratives.
“Filmmaking is about what your chemistry, your botany, your geology is,” he reflected, suggesting that art grows from the deepest layers of one’s lived experience. His years in Calcutta, where painting, literature, and the cinema of possibilities thrived, became his silent apprenticeship, quietly shaping the filmmaker he would become.
When the conversation turned to his debut film Gaman, the room seemed to pause. Muzaffar Ali spoke of the image that birthed the film. Endless streams of people leaving their homes, carrying despair, uncertainty, and dreams in equal measure.
That haunting vision of displacement became the heartbeat of Gaman. The film later won the Silver Peacock at IFFI, but to him, success felt strangely weightless. Awards, he said, didn’t bring empowerment. They only reminded him that every story conquered opens another mountain to climb.
Shaad then turned to his father’s unmistakable signature, the grounded lyricism that runs through his work, from Gaman to the evergreen Umrao Jaan. For Muzaffar Ali, music is not embellishment. It is a consequence, the inevitable blossom of poetry, philosophy, and surrender.
The immortal songs of Umrao Jaan, he explained, were born out of humility and a deep willingness to let poetry lead the way. “Poetry makes you dream, and the poet must dream with us,” he said, capturing the soul of his creative process.
Then came the most fragile chapter, Zooni, the film that became a dream too large, too tender, too bound to its land. Muzaffar Ali shared how weather, terrain, logistics, and fate conspired to pause the film indefinitely. But even in its incompletion, Zooni remains alive, an unbroken thread of yearning.
Kashmir, he reminded the audience, is not a backdrop - it is a culture, a pulse, an emotional universe.
His message was both urgent and hopeful, “Films for Kashmir must be born in Kashmir.” Local stories, local voices, and young Kashmiri filmmakers, he insisted, must carry its heritage forward.
Shaad Ali then offered his own intimate perspective. He has taken up the task of restoring the negatives and soundtracks of Zooni, a way of holding his father’s unfinished dream with both tenderness and responsibility. A short film, Zooni: Lost and Found, further revealed this emotional pilgrimage - a son following the echoes of his father’s vision through time.
In the Q&A that followed, Muzaffar Ali returned to what drives him still - a commitment to telling Kashmir’s authentic, unvarnished story - the very essence of why Zooni was born.
“Kashmir has everything,” he said simply. “You don’t need to import talent. You need to grow it.”
What the audience ultimately witnessed was more than a panel - it was a rare, living testament to the inheritance of cinema. A father who carved his dreams on celluloid. A son who continues to carry them, reshape them, and let them breathe anew.
It was a reminder that cinema is not merely made—it is bequeathed, nurtured across generations, kept alive by memory, struggle, and the eternal hope that the next story will find its way home.
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