From the pandora's box of the 24th Pune International Film Festival, director Praveen Morchhale, unveiled his latest work, White Snow. A visually arresting journey through the unforgiving peaks of the Kashmir Himalayas, the film is being touted as a quiet rebellion and ode to the resilience of the human spirit against the hand of censorship.
The story of White Snow is rooted in the tragic irony of modern repression. Fatima’s son, Amir, sees his filmmaking dreams crushed when religious authorities ban his work after its first screening. His "transgression" was the depiction of post-partum blood after childbirth; a natural reality deemed a social threat.
While Amir languishes in prison on charges of creating social unrest, his mother takes up the mantle of his creative desire. Morchhale uses the vast, indifferent landscape of the Himalayas to mirror Fatima's struggle.
The mountains don't perform; they simply exist. I wanted to capture the poetic realism of these peaks; a space where human conflict feels both infinitesimal and monumentalPraveen Morchhale
The film draws its emotional and political urgency from a reality where voices are not always silenced through overt prohibition, but slowly erased through quieter means. Director Morchhale had revealed earlier that the inspiration came from a real-life incident in which an Indian filmmaker’s short film; about being born in a taxi on a snowy night, was banned.
According to him, the intention is not merely to stop a single film from being seen, but to extinguish the artist’s impulse itself-to erode confidence and desire until creation feels impossible.
This process, Morchhale explained, is rarely sudden. Instead, it unfolds as a calculated and gradual withdrawal of art from the public sphere, producing what he described as an “atmosphere of invisible suffocation,” where absence replaces resistance and erasure becomes normalized rather than contested.