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concerning death and destruction. This film is about the formation of a

people that has three characteristics or maybe four:
First of all, its a people without a state, and so its a history of a
people when there is no real state corresponding to this people.
Second, its a film about a people with a specific culture, and this
specific culture constitutes what there is inside the people itself;
its not a limitation, its not a definition of the people from outside, but its something like the interiority of the people.
And, third, its a film about a people and their occupation by a
strong army of strangers, and so its a people with contradictions
between its inside: the culture, the long history, and so on, and its
outsidebut outside inside: that which comes from outside but is
here inside, in the land, and the great signification of occupation:
something of the outside that constitutes a part of the inside.
These are three great features of Kashmir, and we know that we can
naturally do some comparison with Palestine, but comparisons, as you
know, are never strict. But I think the fourth characteristic is the most
important: the film is about a people who is on the boundary, a people of
boundariesthe boundary between India and Pakistan in this particular
caseand when the people without a state are a people on the boundary,
the boundary itself is the negation of the existence of the people, because
the people are neither on one side nor on the otherthey is really on the
boundaryand so the Kashmiri people are neither a people of India nor
a people of Pakistan; they are the people of the boundary itself, but when
we reduce the existence of the people to the existence of the boundary, in
fact, we suppress the existence of something like the inside, the interior
of the people, we exert the negation of their real existence, and because of
all that we can say there is a universality of the people when they are the
people of boundaries, and this is a philosophical question: why is there
something universal in the people of the boundary? Its because this people exists ONLY as such. They do not exist by their presence in something
big, in something that is installed, in something that is strong. There is
no state, there is no relationship to a great dimension of culture; there is
only a pure existence in the boundary itself. Its the universality of weakness, and its a very important philosophical idea that, generally, what is
universal is on the side not of a strong state, not on the side of potency,
not on the side of that which is rich, but on the side of weakness

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