Rasika Duggal was weary about playing mother to a boy who wants to speak to God about his missing father in Aijaz Khan's Hamid — set in Kashmir — as she did not want to do injustice to a land she knew little about.

"I didn't want to be part of a film on Kashmir without enough knowledge. I told Aijaz to find a Kashmiri actor because I didn't want [the film to be portrayed from] an outsider's [herself] gaze on Kashmir. The role I was playing needed to have an actor with a first-hand experience of what people were going through," says Dugal, quick to add that she was also taken by the narrative, and hence eager to play the part. "Mainstream narratives on conflict situations usually carry a political undertone. The human stories from these situations are usually left out. This was a story that people across borders could connect with."