It all started with Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta’s mother “talking incoherently about tigers.” Dutta was her caregiver. She was intrigued and a bit baffled. “I am not a medical expert. I don’t know what Alzheimer’s actually means,” Dutta observes. Sadly, her mother soon died. That was back in 2015. Dutta, though, realised that Alzheimer’s patients never completely make up stories. Everything they mention, regardless of how offbeat it may seem, will have its roots in something they themselves have experienced.
Dutta’s realisation that her mother had indeed seen a tiger at one time in her life has indirectly inspired her new feature documentary Flying Tigers, produced through Pong Films and receiving its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum.
The filmmaker was a little perplexed that her mother, with whom she had always had a good relationship, had never mentioned seeing a tiger. She was also curious about how and when this could have happened. “It stayed in my head,” she remembers.
Her mother had been a child in the 1940s, the period of the Second World War. In 2018, Dutta had gone to Germany where she lived for five years. While she was there, she met Chinese media scholar You Mi. “I was casually telling her about caregiving. It was the pandemic time. Everybody was talking about illnesses and mortality. I told her about my mother.”
Through You Mi, Dutta heard all about the US military operation in the Himalayas during the war. The American planes had been called ‘Flying Tigers.” They had been bombing Japan and defending China, flying dangerous missions across the Himalayas, or the “Hump’ as it became known, having frequent crashes along the way and leaving an “aluminium trail” in the process.
As Pong Films’ producers notes for the film explain, “the building of an enormous infrastructure destroyed the ecological balance of the jungles, and real tigers appeared in the tea plantations of Assam, where the director’s mother was growing up.”
That’s why, all those years later, her mother was talking about tigers. She really had seen them. You Mi’s family had experiences from the same period but on the other side of the border.
“We decided to do something together. We weren’t very sure whether it would be maybe a film or a book,” Dutta says of her collaboration with the Chinese academic.
Both women started researching. It wasn’t hard to find details about the Americans’ activities in the region during the 1940s. “This road that they built, it is much talked about and so I knew that – but I didn’t know the scale of it,” Dutta notes. “When you start doing research, you’ll be surprised at how easily material is available. There are lots of pilots’ memoirs, lots of museums in the United States.”
The director, though, wants to issue a disclaimer. She is keen to point out that she isn’t really trained as a researcher. “I don’t have any methodology. I just make notes here, make notes there. If somebody asked me to share my research, I would not know which texts to send.”
Her flair is for making connections. From her mother’s tiger, she somehow leaps into an analysis of Chinese infrastructure and tells the story of the “new silk road” between Chongqing in southern China and Duisburg in the heart of industrial Germany.
Flying Tigers has a loose, freewheeling structure. There are scenes of children playing in the forests, musical interludes and reflections on landscape and history.
“I not only used multiple cross disciplines but I also want my audiences to be aware of it,” she says. She adds that she wanted the documentary to have some of the academic rigour she learned from working in Germany in the film but, “at the same time, I didn’t want to compose the easy, lyrical way of telling stories that is my inheritance.”
“I am quite influenced by German film essays but my storytelling, my narrative unfolding rhythms, is very Indian,” she continues.
She is happy that so many different languages and storytelling styles are included in her film. “Hybridity” is a phrase she keeps on repeating.
Dutta believes that few, if any, German filmmakers would begin a documentary, as she does in Flying Tigers, with scenes of children running amok. “That’s a very Indian thing to do.”
And, no, she wasn’t directing most of the kids. Most had no idea they were appearing in a film. “They were just having fun. But the main girl who comes back at the end of the film with the animated tigers, I shot with her for almost a week…this girl, she’s a local person. She was very comfortable in the forest and I was not. I was thinking I would slip and fall – but she was very comfortable. [Watching her] I realised there is a thin line between human settlement and wildlife settlement even today. She goes to school, she lives in the town but there is a comfort level [with the forests]. It is not as difficult to co-exist as we make it out to be. Not only to co-exist between communities but with wildlife and humans.”
The director noticed that the people living near the forest had no fear of the tiger. If someone mentioned that one was coming, they’d simply close the doors. “It’s more of a nuisance than [a cause] for fear. That, this girl has got. When I walked with her in the forest, I realised this ease she has that I don’t have.”
This is Dutta’s first feature doc in two decades. “My last film was 20 years back,” she acknowledges. Her previous credits include Seven Islands and a Metro (2006) and Scribbles on Akka (2000). She has directed plays and has been involved in curation as well as making documentaries.
Alongside the director and You Mi, there is also a third protagonist, young Assamese writer Purav Goswami, an expert on landscape, topography and soil who is working on maps. “Mapping, making atlases, is no more a drawing board exercise,” she says. “It is also [now about] lived-in experiences, tactile experiences.”
Dutta currently divides her time between Germany and India. She was in Cologne for five years where she was the artistic director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World – ADKDW). She still has a resident’s permit for Germany but India remains her home country and “the main inspiration” for her work. She has known Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger, the German artists/producers who founded Pong, for many years. Back in 2004, they together made From Here to Here, a film about Germans in India and Indians in Germany. Pong was therefore a natural partner for Flying Tigers.
The documentary will be distributed in Germany by Arsenal. The filmmakers are in talks with Women Make Movies for US distribution. But, no, Dutta isn’t sure yet when it will show in India. First, Dutta will need to secure a censorship certificate.
“What this film has taught me is ease with other cultures. In the process of making this film, I went to China for a month. I was given a visa only for a month…but it was so exciting. It woke something inside me about dealing with other cultures. It is always possible to start a dialogue,” she insists.
