As a child of 10, Lakshmipriya Devi remembers her heart pounding every time there was a knock on the front door.
“We didn’t know if the person on the other side was someone trying to hide from the army or someone coming to extort and threaten us,” she says. The memory remains so visceral that, decades later, her voice shakes when she talks about it.
Not wanting this to be the only world their child knew, Devi’s parents admitted her to a boarding school in New Delhi, far from Imphal, and from the insurgency, ethnic violence and State overreach that still plague their beloved Manipur.
By the time she left, though, Devi — who would never really live in Manipur again — was taking something indelible with her: stories, of a land of misty mountains and ancient legends, folk tales and family lore.
Most of the family stories centred on a great-grandfather who disappeared as a young man. “There are all these fables about what might have happened to him,” says Devi, 52.
Too many families are forced to build such lore. But stories of the life her great-grandfather might be living “in exile” fuelled her imagination. “I would often think about what it would be like to go looking for him,” she says.
These legends, distilled and reshaped, make their way into her debut film, Boong.
The coming-of-age tale follows the nine-year-old titular character (played by an endearing Gugun Kipgen) as he travels to the border town of Moreh, in search of his missing father. He is accompanied by a curious best friend, a migrant from Tamil Nadu named Raju (Angom Sanamatum). The film walks a delicate tightrope between depicting life lived in the shadow of violence and bigotry, and celebrating the tenderness, humour and deep humanity that persist, no matter the conditions.
Boong had a limited theatrical release in India and, in end-January, was nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award. That’s already a big win for a small, independent film rooted in personal loss.
Work on the movie began for Devi eight years ago, after the death of her father. Growing up, she says, she had always wanted to visit the bustling, cosmopolitan border town of Moreh. “He had promised to take me.” After his death, she did go, in a pilgrimage of sorts.
Grieving and angry, at the tragedy of her home state and all the years with him that it cost her, Devi started writing a sort of fictionalised personal account of the life she had lived, the people she knew, and how she would have liked to see it all turn out.
“I just needed closure of some sort,” she says.
The words poured onto the page, and in three days she had her story.
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Devi already had years of filmmaking experience at this point.
She had served as assistant director on Farhan Akhtar’s 2004 film Lakshya and as first assistant director on Zoya Akhtar’s iconic Luck by Chance (2009), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti (2006), Reema Kagti’s Talaash (2012); Rajkumar Hirani’s PK (2014) and Mira Nair’s Netflix series A Suitable Boy (2020), among others.
It was Kagti, in fact, who recommended that Devi adapt her story into a screenplay.
Looking at it afresh, with this thought in mind, she saw that the pain would have to be leavened at least a little. She wanted this to be something Manipuris could identify with, find cathartic, but ultimately enjoy.
“I don’t consume anything violent, be it books, music, movies or series. When you’ve grown up with so much physical and mental violence around, why would you pay money to consume more of it? Ask any Kashmiri and they’ll tell you the same thing,” she says.
But that wasn’t all. If this was going to be her Manipur story, there was so much it would have to address. The insider-outsider debate. The children banished for their own good, growing up far away from everyone who loved them. The slurs they faced in college. The slurs outsiders faced in Manipur.
“As a woman from Manipur, xenophobia has been a constant thread through my life,” she says. “I wanted it all to be part of Boong because I may never get a chance to address any of it again.”
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By 2020, Devi had her screenplay. Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani’s Excel Entertainment pledged to help her make the film.
Her next challenge was a formidable one: working with non-actors (she was determined to cast locals who fit the roles rather than actors who would have to adapt to them), among them untrained children, in her first directorial venture.
Devi says she felt a lot more confident after meeting her lead actor, Kipgen, 12. He was a natural, charming on screen and undaunted by the camera. “He was just fearless,” she says.
Sanamatum, who would play Raju, was very shy but the boys had instant chemistry. “As we filmed, I would describe to them how their characters were feeling in a scene, and they would just deliver,” Devi says. “They are both so intelligent. Sometimes they would say to me: ‘I am feeling like this in this scene because this happened earlier, right?’”
As work progressed, Devi found herself deploying lessons she had learnt from other filmmakers. “Rajkumar Hirani always takes feedback from everyone. And regardless of how much planning Zoya and Reema do, they also know when to move on when something isn’t working,” she says. “Farhan keeps the space around his monitor very private.”
Large parts of the film were shot on location in Moreh, which borders Myanmar and has thriving Tamil, Marwari and Gorkha communities. “Before Independence, all these people had moved to Burma to work. When the military-led administration took over in the 1950s, they returned to India and many decided to settle in Moreh, close to what they knew and now thought of as their home.”
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A week after Devi and the crew finished filming in the state, in February 2023, there was another outbreak of ethnic violence between the Meiteis and Kukis.
Who has the right to land, to call themselves Manipuri, to benefit from reservations? These questions continue to tear communities apart here. In the years since, hundreds have died and thousands have been displaced. Many members of Boong’s cast, including Kipgen’s family, now live in temporary relief camps.
Devi thinks back to the months members of both tribes spent, working together on the film, and feels a pang. “When the film was released last year, Kukis and Meiteis watched it together in theatres across the country. That was the greatest reward,” she says.
(The BAFTAs will be announced at the end of the month)
