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SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

It Is This: creating against one's own legend.

It Is This · 2023

A source-led reading of It Is This as cinematic narrative: creation, confrontation, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026300 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

creation
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

confrontation
03

FORM

cinematic narrative
04

RECORD ANCHORS

kashmir · kashmir's · chaila

The record for It Is This yields three coordinates specific to its premise—kashmir, kashmir's, and chaila. That vocabulary places creation at the center and gives confrontation its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

It Is This brings creation into contact with confrontation through cinematic narrative. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A strong, singular piece of cinema driven by genuine directorial conviction.

It Is This (2023) arrives with the coordinates of a cinema film situated in 2020s cinema. The record credits Rizza Alee with the direction and places its documented performers in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as cinematic narrative, the film carries the pressure of confrontation. Creation is not merely an outcome to admire; it becomes labor, discipline, and sometimes a strategy for surviving the gaze of others. The most precise critical test is therefore the precision with which conflict redistributes power. The starting point is neither automatic approval nor suspicion. It is curiosity about construction: how do familiar elements combine to produce a particular voice, experience, or resistance?

The counterpoint reads the work less as pure expression than as the place where the artist arranges what cannot be said directly. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of creation, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The counterpoint replaces immediate reaction with a map: decisions, consequences, resistance.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The twist: replace the rating reflex with close attention to decisions. Here, creation changes meaning under the pressure of confrontation.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

A snowboarding adventure in the breathtaking terrain of Kashmir. A sport that is traditionally associated with Western youth, IT IS THIS is set against the stunning backdrop of the Himalayas, and chronicles the sport's history in the East through Kashmir's first snowboarder, 54 year-old Firdous Ahmad Chaila. Filmmaker Rizza Alee and Mr. Chaila venture into uncharted territories battling the elements as they navigate through treacherous slopes and deep powder of Kashmir's winter sports playground, Gulmarg. "You don't often see brown people dressed in the traditional pheran gliding the line on a snowboard. The documentary challenges the norms by defying traditions and stereotypes in the mountain ranges of the most militarized zone on the planet - Kashmir, north of India."

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2023
Runtime
11 min
Direction
Rizza Alee · shidan majidi
Performers
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