Boong

More than once while watching Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, I was reminded of Aijaz Khan’s Hamid (2018) – another Indian film that used the ruse of a “children’s film” to examine a region riddled with conflict. In Khan’s film, a serendipitous phone call between a seven-year-old local (Talha Arshad Reshi) searching for his‘disappeared’ father and a CRPF jawan (Vikas Kumar) became an unintentional humanitarian bridge in the midst of Kashmir’s paranoia. In Devi’s film, the unrest in Manipur remains an undercurrent, filling even the ‘cute’ scenes with an unease.

At a moment when Indian theatres are increasingly crowded with spectacle — pan-Indian actioners, franchise filmmaking and historical epics — Boong arrives as something radical: a children’s film that trusts the intelligence and emotional acuity of its young protagonist. That it is returning to theatres after becoming the first Indian film to win the BAFTA award for Best Children’s & Family Film (defeating Disney’s Zootopia) is both a milestone and a small indictment. A milestone because a Manipuri-language film has found global recognition; an indictment because the film needed that recognition to be rediscovered by Indian audiences.

Marked by a keen eye for detail, a gentle rhythm and controlled buoyancy, Boong, Manipuri writer-director Lakshmipriya Devi’s remarkably accomplished debut feature, probes a climate of discord and disquiet in the garb of a story of a boy, his mother and her absent husband. The deceptively simple but marvellously evocative and wonderfully well-crafted film views life in a strife-torn region through the prism of a fractured family that hopes against hope of becoming whole again. Boong, produced by Excel Entertainment, is a tale of love, loss, longing, and a tenacious spirit rooted in a child’s innocence and innate ebullience in the face of adversity. The film just won a BAFTA Award in the “children’s and family film” category. But it breaks the confines of the genre with intent.

In a country that is so diverse that there is a new language, a new cuisine, a new landscape, a new cultural ethos, and even a new set of rules and regulations every 100-200 kilometres, perspective is everything. That is why it feels futile to try to make sense of the things that are ‘different.’ Why not just embrace the vibrance of diversity without trying to burden it with the monotony of uniformity? When Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong presents us with her view of Manipur, it doesn’t ask us to analyse the differences, but to appreciate the similarities. And the best way to do it is to tell a film through the eyes of a boy, who might be corrupted by the world around him, but he has the excuse of saying, “But I didn’t know better.”

Boong tells the story of little Brojendro “Boong” Singh (Gugun Kipgen), a naughty Manipuri kid from Imphal who sets out to search for his absent father in the bordertown of Moreh. It’s been years since his dad left home, phone calls have stopped being returned, but young Boong wants to surprise his single mother Mandakini (Bala Hijam) with the ‘gift’ of the man’s return. He leaves him voice messages to no avail. Their village mysteriously receives news of the man’s death, but Mandakini refuses to believe it. Boong notices her distress, so his journey with best friend Raju (Angom Sanamatum) into the unknown — into neighbouring Myanmar, even — is framed as a bittersweet Home Alone-coded adventure. The two boys reach their destination by hiding in a wreath next to the corpse of a friend’s grandfather in a hearse.

Aijaz Khan’s Hamid and Danish Renzu’s Half Widow are the names that easily come to my mind when it comes to movies about husbands going missing. But both the aforementioned films have the backdrop of the political crisis in Kashmir. This is where filmmaker Lakshmipriya Devi’s Manipuri movie Boong stands apart. It is more of a personal story of a boy whose father goes missing not due to any political tensions.