I’m on a bit of a Bollywood kick this week. Since Saturday, this is my fourth Bollywood. My film professor from last semester originally told me about Haider, when I asked her if there were any more Bollywoods she’d recommend (after she had the class watch Om Shanti Om, I was officially obsessed). Haider was the first one she told me about, in addition to sending me an email list of about a dozen more. I finally got around to watching the Hamlet adaptation (yes, a Bollywood Hamlet) last night and I wasn’t disappointed because holy fuck is this a crazy film.

I went into this film having no prior knowledge of the Kashmir conflicts, and so half the time I spent watching the movie and the other half I spent frantically googling what was going on. While the film remains an adaptation of Hamlet, with the brooding and wonderfully emotional main character, Haider (played by the brilliant Shahid Kapoor) avenging the spirit of his dead father against his uncle, it is primarily an intimate portrayal of the Kashmir conflicts as they were in the 1990s, adapted from Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night.

Setting the story of Hamlet against the brutal and stunningly visual environment of Kashmir was probably one of the best decisions a filmmaker has ever made when adapting a classic Shakespeare narrative. The Kashmir and Jammu conflicts have left thousands of people “missing” or “disappeared” as well resulting in as many as 40-100 thousand dead: Haider spends much of the first part of the movie searching for his missing father, protesting along with the other civilians and their missing family members. When he finds out how his father died (after being brutally tortured in an illegal prison camp due to his political uncle turning him into the police) he, rightfully, starts going a little crazy. And because this is a Bollywood, Hamlet’s classic scene where he puts on a play for his uncle and mother while accusing him of murder, is turned into a full-blown dance number, with vivid dancing costume colors set against the stark white snowy landscape of the Kashmir mountains.

Because of its tense topic and filming location being right in the middle of Kashmir, the film was briefly boycotted in India before its release due to its depiction of torture by the Indian Army: despite that, it was well-received in many countries, and was even the first Indian film to win the People’s Choice Award at the Rome Film Festival. And rightly so, as this film is brilliant. I’ve never seen a more dramatic Hamlet: Haider makes for such a believable character, in his determination and compassion for much of the first half of the film to his bitterness and violent anger by the second.

You, like most consumers of media, are likely sick of the endless Shakespeare adaptations but I think if I were to recommend one more, I’d recommend this one. You’ll forget you’re watching a Shakespeare movie only a few minutes into the film, as the lives of the people of Kashmir take center stage.

Haider (2014)

Shall I compare thee to a cool movie? 
To watch or not to watch that is the Q
Short or long i don’t care as long as we
Can eat a lot of snacks and wine for two 

Snowy mountains where our hamlet presides
Amidst gunfire and bodies piled in trucks  
A dead father and an uncle who lies 
Don’t cry or fret this Shakespeare doesn’t suck

A poet and reporter fall in love 
Like good ophelia and dear hamlet 
Are doomed to suffer as red-painted doves
In fair Kashmir where our story is set 

Sonnets are so hard to write holy shit
Now you should watch the film: it’s really sick

(no I didn’t do iambic because fuck that)