Kheshgi and Patel had, prior to their trip, spent months in research, reading human rights reports and other documents and talking to numerous Kashmiris and experts in the US and in India.
At the beginning of the film, the two speak to a man on the phone – 'the guide' as they refer to him -- a Deep Throat-like individual who never shows his face in the film but often gives advice, and is a source to the filmmakers.
"He is what you see on the screen -- someone we trusted and vetted for two years," Patel says. "He could be neutral as they get and yet, because of his past and present, he could not reveal his identity."
The guide's first advice to Kheshgi and Patel is not to trust anyone. It is a stark and terrifying conversation that lays the stage for the rest of the film.
"It was scary," Kheshgi adds. "But that's what it feels like to be there. When you are in an environment where anyone can be a militant or a government spy, you don't know what people's motivations are. You have to be very, very careful about what you speak and to whom. And so in the beginning of the film, we were very quiet and kind of rocked by that. We didn't expect this to be a vacation, but we knew that there will be people who will talk to us."
Eventually through their contacts, the filmmakers befriend three people, including two journalists -- Muzamil Jaleel, the Kashmir bureau chief of The Indian Express; his close friend Aarti Tikoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who was The Times of India correspondent in Jammu and is currently a student of international politics at New York's Columbia University; and Khurram Parvez, a human rights advocate who lost a limb in a land mine accident. Project Kashmir is often told through the points of views of these three individuals, who are in some ways the future of Kashmir.
Image: Tourists enjoy a shikara ride at the Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images
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