Winter 2025
Zero Bridge
Tariq Tapa
Artists Public Domain
presents
A Film Desk Release of
Zero Bridge
A Film by Tariq Tapa
The First Film from Kashmir in Forty Years
director/screenplay/camera/sound: Tariq Tapa
producers: Hilal Ahmed Langoo, Josée Lajoie, Tariq Tapa
executive producers: Tyler Brodie, Hunter Gray, Paul Mezey
executive producers: Calvin Preece, Ed Branstetter
post production supervisor: Phaedon Papadopoulos
marketing + outreach: Film Presence (NYC)
a Kashmir/USA co-production
In the tradition of hard-hitting neo-realist filmmaking comes ZERO BRIDGE, the debut feature of Tariq Tapa, a US-born filmmaker of Kashmiri/Jewish-American descent. Having spent his childhood summers in India-controlled Kashmir with his father’s family, he was committed to making a film of quotidian life, far from Bollywood fantasies and Western news reports of terrorism: Dilawar is a teenage pickpocket whose escape plans are complicated when he develops an uneasy alliance with a woman (herself fleeing an arranged marriage) whose passport he has stolen. ZERO BRIDGE is a story of two young people's struggle to retain their humanity, despite poverty, the traditional culture into which they’ve been born, and the fatalism, sexism and casual cruelty of their families.
“Gritty, powerful… a real find.”
“Suspended between the new Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and American independent cinema.”
“Made for a song with a non-pro cast and DV camera gear out of his backpack, Tariq Tapa’s debut feature shows the young Kashmiri-American as a filmmaker of enormous promise and precocious maturity. Tapa’s poetic neorealism is less a stylistic intrusion than a keeping of faith, through the film’s deliberately uneven pacing, with a life devoid of rhythms to count on.”
“Amazingly mature and enjoyable, with realistic performances and a great look.”
“A bull’s eye. Made on a shoestring, ZERO BRIDGE is a surprise from start to finish and it will move even those with hearts of stone. The direction is as intuitive and spontaneous as Srinagar City [the film’s setting] is precarious, dangerous and claustrophobic.”
