When dissident filmmaker Arfat Sheikh, who is from India-Occupied Kashmir, spoke to Images in February, he said his film, Saffron Kingdom , was an attempt to take back the pen writing the stories of his people from Bollywood. Now, after completing a successful lap around the festival circuit, the film has been released to audiences worldwide on the Palestinian-owned streaming platform Watermelon+.
Saffron Kingdom follows Masrat (Diana Aras), a half-widow — a term used for Kashmiri women whose husbands have been abducted by Indian forces. She flees the valley with her young son Rizwan (Alex Cheeks) in the wake of her husband’s enforced disappearance.
Masrat settles in the US, where both she and Rizwan must grapple with traumatic memories from their time living under occupation. The filmmaker said women played a central part in the movie, “the main character is a woman… you see another woman playing an important role… it’s an allegory I’ve used”.
“You don’t see a lot of men in the film because there aren’t a lot of men [left] in [India-Occupied] Kashmir,” he explained. “But you see women, and through them you understand what it takes to live in an occupation,” Sheikh had told Images .
The film premiered at the Wake Forest Film Festival in the United States and went on to play in six more countries, often to full houses with a strong showing from minority communities who related to its themes of migration and the trauma of persecution at home.
Saffron Kingdom joins Academy Award nominee The Voice of Hind Rajab , Bafta winning documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack and Pakistan’s 2025 Oscar submission The Glassworker in Watermelon+’s extensive library of works.
Cover photo: Arfat Sheikh/Daffodil Studios
