Haider

Vishal Bhardwaj completed his Shakespeare trilogy — after Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello) — with Haider, a transposition of Hamlet to the Kashmir Valley in the mid-1990s, during the height of the armed insurgency. Shahid Kapoor plays Haider, who returns to Kashmir to find his father disappeared by the Indian army, his mother (Tabu, luminous and devastating) remarried to his uncle (Kay Kay Menon), and the valley itself a graveyard of mass graves and half-truths.

The film is astonishingly brave. It depicts the Indian army's counter-insurgency operations — "encounter killings," mass detention, torture — with a frankness that no mainstream Bollywood film had attempted before. The famous gravedigger scene from Hamlet is reimagined as a group of Kashmiri men digging a mass grave while singing about the occupation.

Tabu's performance as Ghazala — Gertrude in the original — is one of the greatest in contemporary Indian cinema. Her final speech, explaining why she married her husband's killer, reinterprets Gertrude's silence as an act of survival. Haider was both a commercial and critical success, proving that a Shakespearean tragedy about Kashmir could find an audience across India.