Filmmaker Sayyed Nadeem Kazmi on the Shiite Muslim festival of Ashura, which marks the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
An excerpt from the BBC story:
I grew up with these Shia commemorations, which take place annually during the holy month of Muharram, which is the first year of the lunar Islamic calendar.
Every year, I would be taken to the "majlis", or gathering, where the Tragedy of Karbala would be retold through poetry, rhythmic oratory, and passion plays, a tradition going back centuries.
The immaculately robed cleric would recount the events chronologically and in great detail, eliciting an emotional response from the audience, many of whom wept uncontrollably.
Journey
As he finished his sermon, the entire congregation would rise to their feet and begin beating their chests in an irresistible rhythm to the sound of nuhakhans, reciters of odes, that accompanied the self-flagellation.
On the day of Ashura, a small number of men would form a circle and, taking off their shirts, whip their backs with curved blades hung together in bunches known as "zanjirs".
Although many Muslims condemn the practice of self-flagellation, those who engage in it will tell you that the whole point is in fact about opposing violence
It was these experiences that led me to recently produce a documentary film on these commemorations as I knew them. Thus, the making of Ten Days took me to Pakistan on an ethnological journey where I wanted to find out why men would slash their own backs in remembrance of Hussein's martyrdom, or the relevance of Zuljina, the horse, or how the standards that grace the processions are made.
Ultimately, I wanted to know what devotion to Hussein meant for those that participated, every year, in these ceremonies.
Whether a participant or not, one cannot avoid voyeurism, but I wanted to respond to what I considered to be the mythologising of these ceremonies, perhaps even their politicisation in the contemporary context.
But, most of all, I wanted to capture the raw energy of Ashura in Pakistan with images that would both captivate and challenge audiences' perceptions and assumptions - whether Muslim or not.
