India, Oct. 5 -- When Mushtaaque Ali Ahmad Khan began organising a film festival in Srinagar in 2017, the valley had no functioning cinema hall.

The absence of screens did little to discourage him. He and his colleagues brought films, filmmakers and audiences together through the Kashmir World Film Festival, trying to keep a cinematic culture alive at a time when even the prospect of reopening cinemas seemed distant.

Nine years later, Khan found himself making a different case for Kashmir's film community.

This time, he was asking why the people who had spent years building that community had been left out of a government-sponsored international film festival.

Khan, founder and director of the Kashmir World Film Festival and chairman...