How Women Filmmakers From The Northeast Are Rewriting Boyhood

Indian cinema has always been fascinated with fathers who disappear, and that absence usually becomes narrative fuel, producing sons who grow into anger, revenge, or authority.

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Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong treats that absence differently. The film follows a nine-year-old boy named Boong who believes the most meaningful thing he can offer his mother is the return of his missing father. The adults around him speak cautiously about the man, trading rumours about sightings near Moreh on the India-Myanmar border. 

At first glance, the premise resembles a familiar childhood adventure: two boys travelling through landscapes they barely understand, following rumours like breadcrumbs. But Devi is far less interested in adventure than in observation. Through Boong and his friend Raju, the camera wanders into a social world structured by hierarchies of ethnic tension, casual prejudice, religious suspicion, and the small negotiations that shape everyday life in a border town.

The boys do not yet possess the language to explain these forces. What they register instead are shifts in atmosphere. Conversations hesitate when certain identities enter the room. Strangers alter the emotional temperature of a space. Jokes carry an undertone that feels slightly off, even if their meaning remains unclear. Children often recognise these signals long before anyone explains the politics behind them.

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Power rarely introduces itself through grand declarations. More often, it becomes legible through tone, silence, and the careful choreography adults perform around subjects they would rather avoid. This attentiveness to the emotional life of childhood becomes especially striking when one considers who is telling the story. Boong is a film about boyhood directed by a woman, and that fact subtly reorganises the film’s narrative gravity.

Indian cinema has always known exactly how to narrate the journey from boyhood to masculinity. The pattern is familiar enough to feel almost instinctive. A missing or flawed father becomes narrative propulsion. Injury matures into anger. Anger eventually crystallises into authority. The boy grows into the man the story has been rehearsing all along.

But Devi declines that transformation.

Boong does not move through the film like a hero in formation. He remains a child who is curious, confused, observant, and still learning how the adult world operates. His father’s disappearance does not push him toward vengeance or hardened masculinity. Instead, it intensifies his attention toward the person who remains present in his life.

And that is his mother.

Mandakini, played with remarkable steadiness by Bala Hijam, carries the emotional weight of the film without ever becoming a symbol of maternal suffering. She exists as a person continuing to live a life that has become socially complicated. She works, manages the rhythms of the household, disciplines her son when necessary, and navigates a community that has many narratives available for missing men but far fewer generous ones for the women they leave behind.

A missing husband generates speculation, but a woman without a husband generates scrutiny. Mandakini lives within that scrutiny with a composure that feels recognisably human rather than theatrically resilient. Watching her, Boong absorbs lessons about adulthood that no explicit conversation could easily provide. He believes he is searching for his father. What the film records is the more significant process of him learning how adults actually survive.

Manipur itself is central to that education. Writing about the Northeast has long suffered from two predictable distortions. One romanticises the region into landscapes of mist and folklore; the other flattens it into a shorthand for insurgency and crisis, but Boong avoids both impulses. It situates domestic life within the specific social contradictions of Manipuri society.

Meitei social structure remains historically patrilineal, with inheritance and lineage organised through the male line. At the same time, women occupy an unusually visible role in the valley’s economic life. The Ima Keithel market in Imphal run entirely by women for generations, stands as one of the most striking examples of female economic centrality anywhere in South Asia. Women dominate the marketplace, conduct trade, and shape public space in ways that challenge mainland assumptions about gendered visibility.

Visibility, however, does not dissolve patriarchy; it simply exposes its contradictions.

Women sustain the economic and social rhythms of daily life. Men continue to anchor lineage, legitimacy, and inheritance. Mandakini lives precisely within that tension, negotiating independence and surveillance at the same time. Boong’s understanding of adulthood emerges from watching that negotiation unfold.

Seen within this context, Boong becomes part of a larger cinematic tradition emerging from the Northeast—one that has been reshaping the emotional vocabulary of Indian filmmaking.

Rima Das’s Village Rockstars offered one of the most tender portraits of rural childhood in Indian cinema, where a young girl’s dream of owning a guitar slowly revealed the labour and resilience of the mother sustaining her life. In Bulbul Can Sing, Das turned adolescence into a study of how communities discipline gender and sexuality through gossip, shame, and social pressure.

Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo explored female autonomy within the intimate emotional politics of a Sikkimese household. Decades earlier, Aribam Syam Sharma’s Ishanou presented one of Indian cinema’s most extraordinary portrayals of female spiritual transformation, granting a woman’s interior life the cinematic scale usually reserved for male crisis.

These films share a common vantage point because they observe society through the lives of those who usually inherit its consequences rather than its authority: children, daughters, mothers, and women navigating systems they did not create.

Feminist film theory has spent decades examining this shift in perspective. In 1975, Laura Mulvey’s influential essay on the “male gaze” argued that mainstream cinema organises looking at itself as a hierarchy. The camera aligns the viewer with masculine desire, turning women into images to be seen rather than subjects with interior lives. Narrative power belongs to the man who acts. The woman becomes the surface through which the story moves.

Later thinkers pushed the idea further. Bell hooks wrote about the “oppositional gaze,” describing how marginalised viewers learn to watch cinema critically, aware that the screen rarely recognises them as full subjects. Looking back becomes a form of narrative resistance.

These questions resonate sharply within Indian cinema, where storytelling has long been shaped by language, region, caste, and class. Scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have shown how easily complex lives are flattened when they are narrated from elsewhere, particularly in the case of women from the Global South who are often reduced to a single script of suffering.

What these theories ultimately ask is a very simple question. Who gets to occupy the centre of the story. Films emerging from Northeastern women filmmakers answer it by redirecting the camera toward the people who usually stand at the margins of national narratives, and Boong belongs within that conversation.

Boong unfolds in Manipuri, or Meiteilon, a language recognised within India’s constitutional framework yet still marginal within the national film economy. Devi once described the film as “the book I could not write because of my bad English,” a remark that cuts sharply into India’s cultural politics of language.

English often functions as a gatekeeper within Indian cultural discourse. It determines who sounds authoritative, who appears provincial and who receives the benefit of interpretation. A Manipuri-language film receiving international recognition does more than celebrate a single filmmaker. It also redirects attention toward a cinematic culture that has long existed beyond the centres of Indian film power. And that culture has been starkly remarkable.

At first, the story appears simple: a boy searching for his missing father. By the end, the emotional architecture of the film reveals something far more complex. The child believes the missing piece of the household is a man.

The film understands that the centre of that household has been present all along. His mother. And that is the true radicalism of Boong because the film refuses to mythologise the missing man. Instead, it watches the woman who remained—working, parenting, absorbing the scrutiny of a society that rarely forgives female independence and reveals where the real centre of the household has always been.

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