Noted actor and filmmaker Pallavi Joshi said she seldom allows her husband, Vivek Agnihotri to venture out of the house alone. The actress expressed her apprehensions after she was asked about the post- The Kashmir Files trolls and threats.
Speaking at OTV Foresight 2023, Joshi said, “I would be lying if I said no. As the society stands today, we knew we will be attracting backlash if we make the movie because we were not trying to appease anyone with this film. We had a long conversation spanning for weeks about the repercussions before making The Kashmir Files.”
“One thing that helped me a lot was my absence from the social media. I was not aware of the actual magnitude of threats coming our way. But I knew that some people are not happy with the truth being told through the movie. So I make sure, I accompany Vivek every time he goes out,” Joshi said.
On her role of Radhika Menon in The Kashmir Files, Joshi said, “There are two ways of approaching a role. One, you look at the role with a very personal point of view; and two, you look at it with an actor’s point of view. An actor faces challenge when they are given a role to play which they do not have in common. That is actually the beauty of acting. You get to live a lot of different lives in a single life. In that way, playing Radhika Menon in The Kashmir Files was the most challenging role for me to play. But I was the happiest when Vivek selected me for the role, because it was the most complex and strongest character in the movie. It became particularly difficult for me because my scenes were shot on the last two days of the shooting after the entire film was shot.”
“During our research for The Kashmir Files, four years before the movie was shot, we interviewed about 700 people. We had taken testimonies of a lot of people, mainly Kashmiri Pandits who had lost their near and dear ones. Then we thought why this news never came out. We always knew that there is terrorism in Kashmir and the narrative that came out was that the Army was suppressing them and forcing them to opt for terrorism,” she said.
Speaking about the trauma they had to endure while making the movie, Joshi said, “To hear the truth about Kashmiri Pandit genocide after thirty years where not just a few people but an entire community was so brutally tortured that their predecessors are still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), brought tears to our lives during the shoot. In fact, the dialogues in the movie were actually the real statements of the victims we had interviewed.”