At the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, amid the star wattage of Bollywood’s best-known names, the centrepiece is unexpectedly modest: Boong, a film from Manipur directed by Lakshmipriya Devi. It tells the story of a schoolboy who defies the seemingly impermeable borders—geographical, ethnic, and emotional—that have cleaved his state, and sets out to reunite his family.
The boy is played by Gugun Kipgen as Brojendro, aka Boong. A soft-spoken child, he calls his director “aunty.” She, a Meitei; he, a Kuki. In another context, such a pairing might seem unremarkable. But Manipur today lives under the long shadow of violence between the two communities, a conflict that has turned neighbours into strangers. Boong insists on imagining otherwise.
The heart of the film, Devi tells The Indian Sun, lies in a single word: closure. “Whether it’s Israel and Palestine, or even with friends and family—if you don’t close things, you can never move on,” she says. “That is what the film tries to touch upon.”
She recalls how, during filming, crew and community members from every side of Manipur’s divide took part. “Our team itself reflected the unity there is,” she says. “Now that the conflict has happened, many people don’t want to meet people from the other community. I don’t believe in that. You can’t suddenly snap and say, ‘I won’t talk to X because they are a Kuki, or to Y because they are a Meitei.’ The same spirit that we had while making the film—we are functioning with that spirit even now.”
The film’s journey, “made with zero expectations,” feels almost fable-like. It made its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival under the prestigious Discovery section, had its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival 2024, and won the 17th Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Youth Film. Now it is the centrepiece at the ongoing Indian FIlm Festival of Melbourne.
“Australia has been good to us,” says Devi, who made her directorial debut with this film.
Beside her, Gugun nods shyly. When asked about acting in Boong, he says, “It was fantastic. I was happy that aunty trusted me for this role. It was both hard and joyful.”
Asked whether aunty was a tough taskmaster, he admits, “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” As for whether he might make acting a career, he hesitates. “For now it is hard to decide. But if I have the chances, I would like that.”
The director hopes Melbourne audiences will see in Boong not only a child’s resilience but also a world rarely visible from afar.
“Come and say hi to Boong on the 18th,” she says. “You’ll get to see a world which you probably have never seen before. We come from a place very removed from the Indian mainland. The idea you might have of India is through Hindi movies. This is completely different.”
In a time when Manipur is seeing division, Devi and her young actor offer a small but radical insistence: that stories can stitch together what politics tears apart. Closure, in this sense, is not just personal but communal—a way of imagining a future that refuses to calcify into hate.
IIFFM runs until August 24. For more details about the festival and Boong, click here.
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