“Why did you leave me? Why can’t you come back for me?”
Dilawar, a young, unemployed Kashmiri Muslim, is praying, as he does after each of his many calamities in Zero Bridge, to a godlike figure, his mother, who abandoned him, who never answers him. His voice, actually his voice over, has a plaintive, exilic, Jewish ring.
Not surprising, I thought. Tariq Tapa, the 29-year-old director of Zero Bridge, winner of the best film award at Leeds International Film Festival, the audience award at the Mumbai International Film Festival, is Jewish, the son of a New York Jewish mother and a Kashmiri Muslim father.
I was impressed by how Tapa depicts poverty as the systematic pilfering of the air of hope that a man breathes. When we first see Dilawar, he is a pickpocket pacing back and forth across Zero Bridge in Sriniagar waiting for his handler, wearing a Red Sox cap so old and faded it could be something unearthed from an archaeological dig. He’s a sort of overaged, overgrown, Kashmiri Oliver Twist.
Tapa called me from Berkeley to be interviewed. I was surprised to hear him say he didn’t see anything Jewish in the way Dilawar prayed, or in the film itself.
“My work has nothing to do with ethnicity,” he said. “I am interested in discovery. That’s why I make films.”
“Yes,” I responded, “but inevitably we do bring our backgrounds to our art as we do to our lives. For instance, you visited Kashmir every summer until you were almost 10 [when the separatist violence there put an end to his family’s vacations in Northern India]. That was part of your background, and part of the reason you made Zero Bridge. You could as easily have gone to Israel, and that would also have been part of your background.”
I heard an impatient sound at the other end of the phone.
“I didn’t grow up speaking about Israel,” he replied. “My mother didn’t speak Hebrew. We had no relatives there. Israel was abstract to me.”
I was fascinated by how Tapa was able to abstract ethnicity, yet make a film in the neo-realist tradition that was able to transport you inside the skin of his protagonist.
Only later did it occur to me that Tapa, over 40 years my junior, is the product of a generation in America that is all but post-ethnic. Cyber-rooted, unconnected to family stories of dark journeys and deep histories, it glides along its own self-made surfaces. At one point, I seemed to crack his resistance by reminding him that merely wanting Zero Bridge to make noises in Jewish journals was not enough.
“Any artistic activity requires a sense of doubleness,” he said. “Because in the process of doing something artistic, you have two natures operating at the same time; you are experiencing something and you are observing something. Something may happen along the way that may complicate that sense of doubleness, like multiple ethnicities in your life.”
Whatever else Tariq Tapa may be, he is no panderer. I like that about him.
The director arrived in Kashmir to shoot his film without any knowledge of Kashmiri. (Zero Bridge was shot entirely in Kashmiri.) He had no money, no crew. He relied on his cousin Hilal to help with translations. He had another cousin, Imran, work as his production assistant. Together, they biked around Srinigar with glue and a brush, in a war zone, to affix audition posters to walls casting for the role of Dilawar. (Imran was eventually cast as Dilawar.) The two must have resembled characters stolen from De Sica’s Bicycle Thief.
If I were casting for the part of an itinerant Jewish director shooting a film with Chaplainesque chutzpah in a land serenaded with bomb blasts and infected with the ill will of two nations, I would choose Tariq Tapa.
The contradictions of a Jewish-Muslim filmmaker
