Lounge
Lakshmipriya Devi on the cathartic experience of making ‘Boong’
Summary
The director of 'Boong', which recently played at the Toronto International Film Festival, on why the filming process was a ‘documentation of unity’In Lakshmipriya Devi’s directorial debut Boong, which had its world premiere at TIFF 2024, a 10-year old child is told to lead a prayer recital at his school in Imphal, Manipur. “Like a virgin," he solemnly recites, the entire school assembly repeating after him, “touched for the very first time… when your heart beats next to mine, gonna give you all my love, boy."
The cheeky scene says a lot about the mischievous kid, Boong (played by Gugun Kipgen), at the heart of the film. He and his mother Mandakini (played with a stoic elegance by Bala Hijam) are a tight team. The third figure in their family, father Joykumar, isn’t in the picture—he’s off in the city of Moreh, on the border of Myanmar, running an ostensibly successful teak furniture shop and seems to have ceased all communication with his family. But both Mandikini and Boong believe that he’ll return, with the latter leaving a series of voicemails on his father’s phone urging him to come home as a “gift" for Mandakini on Holi.
Also read: Is that durian in my drink?
Holi comes and goes with no sign of the father, and so of course the precocious and well-intentioned Boong decides to head to Moreh with his best friend, Raju, to find him and bring him back. Set in the 1990s, the film unfolds against a backdrop of simmering political tension, and we see how the antipathy of Manipur residents towards “outsiders," the separatist movement, and a conservative local government all impact daily life in the state.
The film deftly handles moments both lighthearted and sombre, taking an unexpected turn with an audacious and delightful red herring before ultimately revealing the reason behind Joykumar’s mysterious absence. Mint caught up with Devi at TIFF to hear more about the film and the bittersweet experience of premiering it during a period of intense turmoil in Manipur.
You’ve worked as an AD on productions like Luck By Chance, Rang de Basanti and A Suitable Boy. Why was now the right time to direct your own film, and why this story?
It came to me at a time when I was taking a sabbatical from movies, and reconnecting with home. It was actually meant for my diary but I started writing and it became a script and here it is. It's completely fictionalized but there are lots of bits and pieces of my memories. It was a cathartic experience. And it came to me at the correct time. I'm actually happy it didn't happen earlier, because I would have made it very differently. When you're starting out, you have lots to prove but after working in films for so long and because I was not crazy about [the idea of] directing, there was no pressure. I made it as simply as I could because the story is simple.
Working with kids is both challenging and rewarding. How did you find Gugun Kipgen, the young actor who plays the lead?
His relative had come to interview for a production job, and at that time I was asking everyone I met to recommend a kid for the Boong role. I wanted a kid who looks extremely naughty, someone who looks like a rascal. Gugun had that, 210%. And he’s Kuki so he didn't speak Meitei, the language of the film. But he wanted to learn. It was all thanks to his mother, who got him a tutor. In the beginning it was difficult but as the shoot progressed and he would speak a lot with the crew, it became better and better. Traces of [his own accent] are still there but there are also villages on the outskirts of Manipur where everyone speaks a different Manipuri, so I was like 'this much I can live with.’ I just felt no one else could have been like Boong.
The significance of Kuki and Meitei communities working together on this film feels particularly poignant, given the events of the past year.
When I was casting, at that time nobody thought about it. We were doing a Manipuri film, we cast a Manipuri boy, Manipuri mother. Nobody thought, you know, of the break-up. Looking back, I think the whole filming process was like a documentation of the unity we have. A lot of people from different communities came to work and support the film. It's still very unreal, what has happened, and things are not the same.
Did it feel bittersweet to show Boong to an audience, knowing how much has changed in the places where you shot the film?
Now there's been some distance. When I came back after the shoot to do my edit in Mumbai, I could not bear to look at the footage. That was May [2023], it took me till July or the beginning of August to watch the footage without having a breakdown. Because every place that was there, something or the other [has happened]. It was very very difficult. I think it was extreme trauma at that time so now I'm better.
When I was making the film, I thought this might just be my last film, because God knows. With me, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. So I tried to pay tribute to little things. Like Boong’s sign [when using the slingshot] is a brow-antlered deer that's found only in Manipur. The place where his mother works, it's the largest market run only by women in the world. My mother's side of the family owned cinema halls and when the ban [on Hindi movies] happened it was so sad to see them being converted into something else. In my childhood those were iconic places. So we shot in one of those former cinema halls. It was very important for me to shoot in those places, so that it gets documented somewhere.
