Kak was born into a family belonging to the Kashmiri Pandit community of Brahmins. Although of Kashmiri ethnicity, his family has been based in New Delhi for several generations and he works out of that city. Kak studied economics and sociology at the University of Delhi. He is a "self-taught" film-maker who is actively involved in the documentary film movement and in the Campaign against Censorship and the Cinema of Resistance project.
Career
A self-taught film-maker, Kak makes documentary films with a strongly left-wing bent. His early work includes Punjab: Doosra Adhay about the Punjab in the days of the Khalistan struggle, and Pradakshina, about the riverGanges. He followed this with a 1990 film about Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple, Angkor Remembered. In 1993 he released films about the Indian diaspora in England and South Africa. 1995 saw the release of Harvest of Rain. One Weapon followed, "the documentary that marked Sanjay Kak as an explicitly political filmmaker", according to The Caravan magazine, and In the Forest Hangs a Bridge about the making of a bridge in Northeast India; winner of the Golden Lotus Best Documentary Film, National Film Awards; Asian Gaze Award, Pusan Short Film Festival, Korea. His next films were Words on Water, about the struggle against the Narmada dams in central India, which won Best Long Film prize at the International Festival of Environmental Film & Video in Brazil, and Jashn-e-Azadi - How We Celebrate Freedom about the Kashmiri freedom struggle. Jashn-e-Azadi is a film that has "widely influenced the way Kashmir was perceived in India". The film has had a chequered screening history. In 2008, he participated in Manifesta7, the European Biennale of Art, in Bolzano, Italy, with the installation A Shrine to the Future: The Memory of a Hill, about the mining of bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha. He writes occasional political commentary, and is the editor of Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir. His latest feature-length documentary is on the revolutionary Maoist movement in India, called Red Ant Dream. The film was under production for more than three years and released in 2013.
