Restoring and completing his father’s long-cherished dream project, Shaad described it as an experimental and expensive bonding therapy for the father-son duo.
At a time when filmmaking is often driven by box-office returns and awards, director Shaad Ali has chosen a more personal path with Zooni: Lost and Found, a heartfelt tribute to his father, filmmaker Muzaffar Ali.
Restoring and completing his father’s long-cherished dream project, Shaad described it as an experimental and expensive bonding therapy for the father-son duo.
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Years after it was halted owing to funds crunch and insurgency in Kashmir valley, Shaad, is all set to release his film albeit with a twist. The film is an amalgamation of the unreleased recorded footage and unscripted-raw behind the scenes including the father-son.
Calling the original Zooni a horse without any reins, Shaad said that one doesn’t know where it is going to go. “I don’t know where and how it will come,” the Kill Dill director said on the movie’s upcoming release. “It’s got its own journey now. It’s taken 40 years to come here.”
Saying that it was an extremely exhausting journey for him to complete the movie, Shaad said that if somebody told him to do it again, he would not.
“It was not an easy thing to watch my father on an emotional roller coaster ride during the filming. It was very strange. If there was no film to begin with, I don’t think this would have happened. This is very experimental and very expensive therapy to do. I don’t recommend this,” he said.
Adding that during the process of this feature-documentary, he grew closer to his father, Shaad said that the film was a bonding therapy for both of them. “It is a 100% bonding therapy. Which is what I think people will enjoy.”
Elaborating on the challenges during Zooni: Lost and Found, Shaas said there were technical challenges. “As the negatives were in a bad state, we required technology to restore them. There were also emotional and story-telling challenges. It’s a multi challenging subject. Because it is personal. It is interpersonal. And then there is the whole thing of finishing an unfinished film. Putting it in some order, some semblance,” he added.
Speaking about how the audience might react, Shaad said the audience will love it. Because it’s emotional. “It’s engaging. It’s entertaining also. It’s funny. and it is like from my experience of watching films and making them also it’s very new. It’s very strange because it’s unscripted. And yet it is not like interviews or anything. There is no third person.
“And then there are the two of us. So, it’s like a structure and a feeling of sequences like a movie. And characters are like that,” he went on to add.
