Praveen Morchhale’s White Snow (2025) is a quietly radical film, one that reveals how artistic expression is stifled not through spectacle but through the everyday mechanics of fear, authority and silence. Set in an unnamed corner of Kashmir, the Urdu-language drama follows a mother who undertakes a stark, solitary journey across mountain villages to screen her son’s banned short film after he is jailed on fabricated charges. Rendered with spare dialogue, exacting visual restraint and an acute sensitivity to landscape and gesture, White Snow becomes less of a political drama and more of a meditation on the personal costs of truth-telling. The Himalayan terrain and an undercurrent of suppressed social tensions deepen the film’s universality, along with hesitant yet quietly courageous characters.

White Snow premiered at the 2025 São Paulo International Film Festival and was recently screened at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival. In this conversation, Morchhale reflects on restraint as a form of realism, silence as resistance and why the most powerful acts of defiance often unfold in the intimate persistence of ordinary lives.

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Dipankar Sarkar: Your films explore the tension between tradition and modernity and the quiet forms of empowerment within constraints. They rely heavily on minimalism, where sparse dialogue, long takes and silence form an emotional language, and White Snow deepens this approach. What draws you to this restrained mode of storytelling?

Praveen Morchhale: Restraint, for me, is not an aesthetic choice but a way of expressing realism and anger. Most lives unfold quietly through repetition, compromise and endurance. Loud or overly explanatory cinema often drifts away from this reality. Silence and minimal distraction allow viewers to come closer, to see themselves reflected on screen.

In White Snow, restraint was essential because the film is about suppression, not only of art, but of speech and thought. A loud film about silence would feel dishonest. I wanted the film to breathe at the rhythm of its characters, letting gestures, faces and the landscape speak. By not forcing characters to explain their pain, I respect both them and the audience.

I do not believe cinema should instruct viewers what to feel. Long takes and silence create space to observe, search for meaning and even feel discomfort. This shared responsibility is vital to me. Hence, cinema becomes a conversation rather than a statement.

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DS: The idea that a short film, typically seen as a marginal form, can provoke such intense backlash is striking. What drew you to this paradox as the core of your narrative?

PM: What disturbed me was not only the ban itself, but how quietly and systematically it was imposed to create fear and silence an artist. A small, personal short film, far removed from commercial reach, was perceived as dangerous. This paradox reveals the fragility of power and systems that claim strength often fear the smallest truths.

This contradiction became the emotional and political core of the film. A truthful depiction of childbirth, with no propaganda intent, threatened a structure built on control and erasure. It reminded me that art does not need visibility to be powerful. It needs honesty.

The backlash also exposed how censorship operates today through quiet erasure. Films disappear from public conversation, permissions are withdrawn, screenings [are] cancelled and artists slowly [get] exhausted. This invisible violence is far more dangerous than overt bans. Thus, White Snow emerges from a space where fear and silence have become normalized.

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DS: The decision to leave the village unnamed gives White Snow a universal, almost allegorical quality. What guided this choice, and what did you hope it would convey about censorship and artistic suppression?

PM: Where on the earth is censorship not being forced on the public and artists? I felt naming the village would have localized the story and reduced the universal relevance. By leaving the village unnamed, I refuse categorization. Censorship is not confined to one geography, religion or political system. It is a virus which spreads easily without being visible. Without the village’s name, the film becomes less about “there” and more about “anywhere.”

When censorship operates, it removes names, contexts and identities. Artists become anonymous and stories become invisible. The absence of the name is a statement in itself. It invites the audience to recognize the village within their own realities and experiences, breaking the boundaries of country and society. They can feel it as if it is their own story happening in their own backyard. So, this choice also allowed the film to function allegorically without becoming abstract. The village and life in it are real.

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DS: Fatima’s journey is defined by quiet acts of defiance rather than overt resistance. What interested you in exploring resilience at this intimate, personal scale rather than through a broader political spectacle?

PM: Spectacle often trivializes resistance by reducing it to heroes and victories. Real resilience, especially under oppression, is quieter and more ambiguous. It exists in survival, repetition and persistence. Fatima’s defiance is not ideological but ethical. She does not seek confrontation. She seeks continuity of love, expression and artistic desire.

I was drawn to a form of resistance that does not become a slogan. Fatima does not protest or stage rallies. She carries her son’s banned film as a responsibility. Her journey is maternal, physical and deeply personal, and that intimacy gives her resilience a power that cannot be easily criminalized.

This reflects how most people resist in real life not through constant protest but through endurance. By focusing on this intimacy, the film honors those invisible acts of courage that rarely enter history yet sustain it. Every artist, simply by creating, performs such an act of resilience.

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DS: When a lack of electricity prevents Fatima from screening the film in one of the  villages, she narrates the synopsis instead, and the villagers respond with enthusiasm upon recognizing themselves in the story. What role does this moment play in deepening your film’s reflections on community and representation?

PM: This moment was central to my understanding of cinema. It reminds us that cinema existed as story and imagination long before projectors and screens. Stories once travelled through voices, memory and collective listening. When Fatima narrates the film, cinema returns to its most elemental form where imagination is shaped by lived experience.

The villagers recognizing themselves in the story is crucial. Representation here is not about technique but about presence, about feeling seen. When people recognize their own lives in words, something shifts. The story no longer belongs to institutions or the filmmaker; it belongs to the community.

When electricity fails, cinema does not. It transforms from image to word, asserting that art cannot be fully controlled by infrastructure, censorship or technology. As long as there are listeners, stories survive. Like snow, cinema changes form but cannot be erased. Freedom remains its core.

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DS: How did you work with your actors to achieve the finely calibrated emotional shifts with such restrained dialogue?

PM: The process began with keeping everything minimal to its bare form. I asked the actors not to perform but to trust stillness, quietness, and feel the surroundings. I do not like to explain extensively about internal states, memory, fear or dialogue delivery. I simply ask them to feel such situations in their lives and not act the characters. Then silence and emotions naturally become the shared languages on set.

Often, the most important direction I gave was to resist reaction, to allow the body to carry and shift emotion without expressing it overtly. This required immense trust from the actors and from me. They had to believe that the camera would see them even when they did nothing. It would capture their inner state, and that trust was very important.

The environment also shaped performance. High altitude, cold and exhaustion in those mountains were very real. Location and nature played as a character and added to the performance of the artists. Performance became less about acting and more about being in nature and surroundings. This presence allowed emotional shifts to emerge organically without overtly expressing effort. It remains close to real life.

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DS: The landscape in White Snow feels almost sentient, shifting between protection and hostility. How did you and cinematographer Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah shape the environment as an active participant in the narrative?

PM: We never treated the landscape as a background. The mountains dictate rhythm, movement and endurance. They offer beauty but also demand submission from us. With Mohammad Reza, we allowed the landscape to determine framing and duration rather than imposing cinematic logic upon it.

The camera often waits and remains still, just as the landscape does. Weather, light and terrain were not controlled. This surrender to nature by us was important to create the cinematic language of the film. It reminded us that cinema must listen and filmmakers must be with nature. We humans are the most minuscule in the presence of nature.

The landscape also mirrors Fatima’s inner journey and her resilience, hardship and patience. It does not give her comfort, but it accompanies her journey as a partner. In that companionship, the landscape and environment become a silent and faithful witness to her resolve, journey and transformation.

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DS: Similarly, sound plays a crucial narrative role, with breaths, pauses and ambient textures shaping mood. Could you speak about your collaboration with Hossein Mashali and Ómid Mohammadipour in developing this subtle aural palette?

PM: Sound in the film is built around restraint, reality and being the least dramatic. It is closest to the natural rhythm of life. With Hossein Mashali and Ómid Mohammadipour, we focused on presence rather than effect. Silence was treated as a sound, one that carries emotion in its own terms — a strong form of resistance to cacophony. Both of them are talented sound designers, and we discussed how to keep the sound as simple as the images in the film so both become one and complement each other.

We avoided emotional cues. Also there is no music, barring three places, to tell the audience what to feel. Instead, ambient textures, wind, footsteps, breath, the yak’s bell sound and its feet on the ground firms the film in reality. These sounds invite the viewer to lean in and listen and engage actively. It demands their attention. When we played music in the film, it was more for memory than for underlining emotions. In that quietness, the audience becomes part of the film’s inner world. The film does not shout, but it invites the audience to hear its soul.

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DS: As White Snow ends, the film leaves us with a sense of human resilience and the persistence of truth. Was there a particular emotional or philosophical note you wanted the audience to carry with them ?

PM: I do not want the audience to leave with comfort or conventional closure. I want them to feel unsettled, carrying the sense that something as fragile and essential as artistic freedom has survived, even without claiming victory. In White Snow, truth does not triumph. It simply refuses to disappear from public space.

Philosophically, the ending suggests that resilience does not always mean moving forward. Sometimes, it means standing still and refusing erasure. Fatima does not defeat a system or change the world. She protects her freedom and keeps a story alive. For me, that act is both profoundly political and deeply human.

Whereas emotionally, I want the audience to remain with her resolve. The final moments are meant to linger, like truth in our world today that is surviving quietly, stubbornly, through individuals who refuse to bend.

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DS: Given the limited visibility and distribution your films often face in India, what sustains your commitment to making them and keeps you returning to these stories?

PM: I believe that cinema does not exist only to be consumed. It exists to be lived and experienced with. Visibility and distribution are important, but they are not the sole measures of a film’s success. If they were, many urgent and important stories would never be told. Also, what sustains me is conviction. I do not expect large audiences, but I trust that viewers will find these films at the right time in future.

I return to these stories of common people because they come from places that refuse to die. Cinema, for me, is a conversation with society. Even if this conversation happens slowly and over many years, it is worth continuing. This patience is what keeps me returning to these stories. Though I doubt many times how long I can sustain, I feel there is also a responsibility as a filmmaker to tell the world the stories of our time. If I stop making these films, I may be suffocated as an artist. That thought troubles me more than limited reach to the public.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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