Lakshmipriya Devi: Boong is like my bittersweet memory of Manipur

There was this family folklore about a missing great grandfather that had stayed at the back of my mind. I was always fascinated by him. It's also about having double lives. Everyone has a mask—the one you wear at home, how you behave with your family, how you behave with your friends. The idea of someone choosing to have a double life has always fascinated me from the time of Subhash Chandra Bose. What would it feel like if he was alive and came back, in disguise.

Then there are bits and pieces of my own experiences in the film. Like the insider-outsider friendship. In small towns you are often told certain things—to hang with this person and not with another; to be like this and not be like that. These [misgivings] I've seen growing up in Manipur and even when I moved to Delhi, I found that not everybody was very forthcoming in being friends with people who looked different from them, who came from the Northeast. Whoever is in the majority makes fun of the minority. It’s the same anywhere. In Manipur it's the reverse of what’s in Delhi. Like how Raju [Boong’s Rajasthani friend] is bullied. The majority always gangs up against the minority. I was quite conscious of it even when I was in Manipur because I had a Bengali friend who couldn’t have many friends in school. Not everybody from the Northeast had a very big group of non-Northeastern friends in Delhi. The undercurrent of the revolutionary movement [seen in the film] was always there as part of my growing up years. So, all those bits and pieces came into the film. Boong is like my bittersweet memory of Manipur.

These are complicated subjects. It’s the story of a boy. Everything is from his perspective, or to do with the life around him. So, it becomes easier to communicate to somebody else without making it very heavy. When I studied mass communication, one of our teachers taught us puppetry as a tool of communication to deal with subjects like AIDS. That it’s easier to learn from a puppet than an adult. Also, a lot of these things happened to me during my childhood. These are things that adults don't think that kids remember but they do. A lot of those influences came in. And I've always been very interested in telling kids’ stories. My grandmother used to always tell me these folk tales. There are these bits and pieces of me in Boong.

To be very honest, I didn't want to direct. I always wanted to just write. I had the script and just sent it to a friend of mine to budget. He [Vikesh Bhutani] was working in Excel and now has his own company, Chalkboard [co-founded with Shujaat Saudagar], which is one of the producers. He called me the next day and asked if he could produce it. Manipur is not a budget-friendly place. It is more expensive than shooting in Thailand. When we went to Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar it was like, would they be interested in doing a Manipuri film? It's so difficult to get funding for regional cinema. I went with the thought that there’s no harm in asking, at most they’ll say no. But they said, let's do it. I hope they produce more regional cinema after this.

So, there are about five professional actors. Bala Hijam plays the mother Mandakini and there are few theatre actors who play supporting characters like the hotel owner, and the postman. But the rest are all completely new people. I asked friends if they knew a naughty kid who’d be interested in auditioning. I would walk down my neighbourhood and see kids playing or acting. I would catch hold of them and ask if they’d want to act. So, most of them—the kids—are non-actors. Bala is a big actor in Manipur but mainly in commercial films. This is very different from the kind of roles she's been doing. She was also in a Malayalam film with Dulquer Salman [Neelakasham Pachakadal Chuvanna Bhoomi]. It was a pleasure working with her.

I had found a bunch of kids through relatives and friends and got them collected at this place for auditions. And I saw this boy, Gugun, who looked so naughty. I just went up to him and asked him to be Boong. He is a Kuki boy, and he realised he can’t speak the language of the Meitei character Boong. So, he said no. I took him for a walk, asked him if he played with a catapult. We just talked. He was so confident, and I loved the fact that I could talk to him. We both could have a conversation. He eventually played the role. I don't think there could have been any other Boong. His own personality is very much like what you see on the screen.

His friend Raju is being played by a Manipuri boy, Angom, because even though I auditioned a lot of kids, the language was proving very difficult to handle. He had come to audition for Boong but I decided to try him out for Raju.

In 2023. We finished exactly a week before [the conflict started in Manipur]. I get goosebumps because I was there. I saw it happen. I remember very clearly what I was feeling. It’s like the stories you've read about the Partition. You know what you read in books and sometimes watch in films. What I didn't know was that it was going to become so big and so out of control. Irony is a very bad word, but Boong is literally the last documentation of Moreh. It was like the entire town was gone. The places we see in the film and the people will not be the same again. When anyone says you're so lucky you shot before the violence, I say that I was so lucky I got to work with all the communities. It will never be the same again. I will probably not have the luxury of working with everybody, because there's so much of a problem going on there. I could bear seeing my footage. It was not just about the locations. It was also about the places the crew stayed, a home for them was the first house that was destroyed. There were a lot of memories attached. We just went everywhere in Manipur, in the interiors, interacted with everyone, irrespective of who they were, where they came from, what language they spoke in. There's just a faint shadow of it now.

It was a very tricky thing, because I started off by saying a lot.

But somewhere along the way I felt it overshadowed the story of the boy. I felt I really needed to say more but I must take a step back. So that's the reason why politics is kept as a backdrop. It is exactly like that in daily life in Manipur. For instance, you go for a wedding in Manipur, and suddenly there'll be a curfew. You might still be in celebration mode but can’t ignore the curfew. I thought there must be a balance where politics should just be in the backdrop like a character and not overtake the story. I may have certain views, but it does not mean that they all must come out in this film only.

Also, closure is something I feel very strongly about. Half the problems, according to me, are because we always have excess baggage and are not moving on. I wanted that conveyed in the film.

After the Hindi films were banned, or even before that, English songs were extremely popular in Manipur. I was one of the rare few who didn't know English songs. I hardly spoke English. It was very aspirational for me. When I went to the college hostel, one of the seniors was ragging me asking who my favourite singer was. And I didn't know anyone. But I'd heard of and seen posters of Madonna, so I mentioned her name. There were Madonna and Rolling Stones fan clubs in Manipur. English songs are like a secret obsession everyone has back home, and I knew it had to be there in the film.

The place where we shot the shop, The Agarwal Stores, is owned by a Marwari family. They came to Manipur in 1914. I was speaking to the grandfather about it, and he said Manipur was his home. He went out to study but came back to Manipur. That’s how I got to include the line in the film about the Rajasthanis considering Manipur their home, claiming to be Manipuris. That line was originally not there in the script.

I think we'll be showcasing it in other festivals. It will be great if a Manipuri film can be released in even one theatre in Bombay.