Berlin  - American-Israeli director Udi Aloni's controversial documentary about the non-violent Muslim resistance movement in Indian-administered Kashmir has been shown at the Berlin Film Festival.

Indian authorities have taken umbrage at Kashmir: Journey to Freedom and are refusing to allow him to return to India, he said after the film was premiered in Panorama section, which showcases independent and arthouse cinema.

Told a diplomat from the Indian Embassy was among the Berlin film audience, Aloni called to him, saying he should be allowed back into the country.

"Send them a message, please let me return to India. I really miss my friends from Kashmir, and I really love to be in India," he said while defending his documentary and insisting he'd done India a good service in making it.

Aloni said he'd gone to Kashmir without really knowing what he was going to see, and that his film was less a documentary, "more an action movie of a different sort."

"I have alway believed in non-violence," he said.

Kashmir, once described by Mahatma Gandhi as "a pillar of light in a subcontinent lost in darkness," had become "a land of terror and despair, its people suffering under the strain of constant violence and human rights violations," a press release about the film said.

Aloni tells how a new generation of young Muslim Kashmiris, after years of armed resistance, decide to lay down their arms and start a nonviolent resistance movement - in the hope of finally achieving peace and independence.

Aloni's protagonists are shown as they launch their new struggle. Ultimately denied permission to return to India, he was forced to tell the rest of the story far from the land he had come to admire.

India, the world's biggest movie-making nation, has a notably low presence at this year's Berlinale, which runs till February 15. It doesn't have a single feature vying for the competition's top Golden Bear awards.

India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has dispatched one of its top officials, Ms Sushma Singh, to Berlin to help promote Indian films.

"The film industry in India is very important for us," she said at the opening of the India Film Pavilion near the festival's headquarters.

"We produce the largest amount of films in the world - close on 1,000 movies every year - and in 2006 for instance had about 3.7 billion tickets sold in India.

"There is a huge audience for films in our country," she continued, noting that the movie industry in India was solidly embedded in the private sector, with the government role being solely that of a "facilitator and catalyst."

An Indian-German film cooperation agreement was sealed in Berlin during the course of last year's Berlinale and subsequently approved by the German parliament, she said.

Ms Singh said there was a need to popularise that agreement and to tell the film industry on both sides what was on offer.

After the treaty's ratification there have been "some inquiries" but "nothing concrete has emerged so far", she said, emphasising that Germany and India both had lots to offer in terms of talent, locations, and shooting facilities.

"We are keen to see Indo-German film co-productions take off," said Ms Singh, adding she would like to see India as a partner in the Festival's Talent Campus section, promoting young and aspiring film- makers.

Some 350 film-makers are involved in this year's Talent Campus. Documentary Indian film-maker Supriyo Sen's film Wageh is contending for the Berlin Today Award, the short film competition of the Talent Campus.

It deals with the sole checkpoint on the 3,323-kilometre border between India and Pakistan.

Other emerging Indian movie-makers in the Talent Campus programme are Abhyuday Khaitan (New Dehli), Geetha J. (Thiruvananthapuram), Nitin Baid and Sudip Kumar Chattopadhyaya (Kolkata), and Siddharth Pillai (Bangalore). (dpa)