Boong's Big Adventure
Lakshmipriya Devi’s award-winning debut follows a curious, irreverant nine-year-old boy whose search for his missing father reveals childhood’s stubborn hope amidst conflict
Manipuri filmmaker Lakshmipriya Devi won big with her debut film Boong at The British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) this year. Not only is it India’s first win in the Children and Family Film category, but it beat heavyweights like Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch and the French sci-fi film Arco.
The curious thing, however, is that Boong is not really a film for children, even if it has a child at its centre. Nine-year-old Boong, played by an effervescent Gugun Kipgen, is almost doggedly in pursuit of happiness. In the opening shot, he is seen using a slingshot at the school’s name board to dislodge its letters and change it from ‘Oja Hemochandra Boys School’ to ‘Homo Boys School’. In the very next scene, he stirs the pot again by singing Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ during the school assembly, scandalizing the authorities enough for them to oust him.
In a land as fraught as Manipur, the little boy’s actions are more than irreverence; they’re acts of reclaiming what threatens to slip away every moment—childhood. The action elicits laughs from his peers, but further distresses his mother Mandakini (played by Bala Hijam), for whom it’s a double whammy. Her husband has gone missing, and the village elders are scampering to pronounce him dead. Now, her son has been expelled from his local vernacular school, but that, in turn, will allow him to enrol at an English convent school—a longstanding dream of Boong’s.
What Devi does rather cogen...
Manipuri filmmaker Lakshmipriya Devi won big with her debut film Boong at The British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) this year. Not only is it India’s first win in the Children and Family Film category, but it beat heavyweights like Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch and the French sci-fi film Arco.
The curious thing, however, is that Boong is not really a film for children, even if it has a child at its centre. Nine-year-old Boong, played by an effervescent Gugun Kipgen, is almost doggedly in pursuit of happiness. In the opening shot, he is seen using a slingshot at the school’s name board to dislodge its letters and change it from ‘Oja Hemochandra Boys School’ to ‘Homo Boys School’. In the very next scene, he stirs the pot again by singing Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ during the school assembly, scandalizing the authorities enough for them to oust him.
In a land as fraught as Manipur, the little boy’s actions are more than irreverence; they’re acts of reclaiming what threatens to slip away every moment—childhood. The action elicits laughs from his peers, but further distresses his mother Mandakini (played by Bala Hijam), for whom it’s a double whammy. Her husband has gone missing, and the village elders are scampering to pronounce him dead. Now, her son has been expelled from his local vernacular school, but that, in turn, will allow him to enrol at an English convent school—a longstanding dream of Boong’s.
What Devi does rather cogently is simplify the fundamentals of a child’s world, without stripping it of its inherent complexities. Boong’s gaze holds the film together as he computes, with limited vocabulary and boundless curiosity, the things that plague society. The backdrop, rife with communal, ethno-racial and linguistic conflict, becomes, through Boong’s eyes, almost hauntingly ordinary—not in a way that is reductionist, but rather unimaginative in its violence.
The blows are softer when Boong is around, like when he calls his rich new school bully, Juliana, a “second-hand foreigner” as she attacks his best friend—a Marwari boy, Raju—with the racial slur of “outsider” and “blackie”. It disarmingly dissolves the tension through binaries that feel less contrived and more natural to its landscape, which Boong sees as fairly black and white, good and bad.
The film has been touted as a coming-of-age drama, a genre that’s arguably the forté of its biggest producer, Farhan Akhtar’s Excel Entertainment, known for his directorial debut Dil Chahta Hai, followed by Lakshya, and his sister Zoya’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do—all of which explore the inner worlds of wealthy urban folks who had the luxury of not ‘growing up’ well into their 30s. The irony of Boong being produced by the same house, that too with a director who has assisted in many of those films, then, is rather poignant and wonderful. It shows how, the moment the lens focuses on people away from the mainland, on geographical and cultural peripheries, the ‘coming of age’ becomes less of a trope and more of a tool for telling a story of longing and belonging unbeknownst to them. After all, it’s a land where everyone is an outsider—whether by virtue of the tongue they speak, or the parents they have managed to keep or lose.
At the centre of this is Boong’s surreptitious journey with Raju across the border to Myanmar in search of his father, who is suspected of having joined a rebel outfit. His secret quest is a ‘gift’ for his mother, who he believes will regain her happiness with her husband’s return. The trek, which has the narrative arc of a bildungsroman, may not see Boong become an adolescent, but it functions to age him beyond the years of his corporeal existence. As a result, it lets the film reveal truths about a land othered as a cultural blind spot from the vantage point of its people, but without fetishizing them.
What Devi accomplishes is no mean feat. It’s the easiest thing to not let a child be a child in spaces that institutionally hold little human dignity. As Boong stumbles and falls along the way to find his father in Myanmar, he occasionally fights and falls out with Raju. But they have each other’s backs all along. The backdrop of where they belong becomes immaterial in that moment, when on screen we catch glimpses of what could be any of our childhoods.
Devi also slips in a beautiful homage to the prominent queer communities of Manipur, who are discriminated against by the larger society, but seem rather quotidian to a child in search of his lost father. Almost like the waves of the sea, the background and foreground of Boong switch sides and blend seamlessly, offering a piercing portrait of Manipur that is not a caricature. The heartbreaking fact about this film and the people behind it, however, is that it finished shooting only a week before Manipur was hijacked by ethnic brutality in 2023.
Even though Boong now stands twice removed from what could once have been its truth, and is perhaps now more aspirational than before, we’d be better off believing that the little boy’s story isn’t lore, but a lived-in reality that existed before the world stood witness to it.