Flying Tigers

Spurred by her Alzheimer-afflicted mother’s strange evocation of home-invading tigers, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta travels to Assam, India. Here, she learns about the Flying Tigers: US aircraft that transferred military supplies during WWII across the perilous Himalayas, from Assam to Kunming, China. So begins a globe-trotting, decades-spanning docufiction essay on human-scale experience of monumental logistical phenomena, featuring small histories that unfold in the quiet shadows of History writ large. Teaming up with Kunming-born media theorist Mi You and Assam-based researcher Purav Goswami, Dutta contrasts the smooth international flow of goods today with increasing restrictions on people’s movement across borders. Her film reveals how lived realities of frontier populations have always been fluid and malleable, refusing the homogeneity demanded by cartographic political imagination. Appropriately, Dutta adopts a heterogeneous, genre-defying form, mixing interviews, archival material, performances, animation and musical numbers to craft a personal, wide-ranging work at once intimate and colossal. (Srikanth Srinivasan)

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, author and cultural producer living in India and Germany. Her areas of interest are hybridity within public and urban culture as well as documentary and archival practices. She is the founder and former director (1998-2016) of Majlis, a centre for interdisciplinary arts initiatives in Mumbai and former artistic director (2018-2021) of the Academy of the Arts of the World (Akademie der Künste der Welt) in Cologne, Germany. With Flying Tigers, Madhusree Dutta returns to filmmaking after twenty years.

Director Madhusree Dutta. Screenplay Madhusree Dutta. Cinematography Riju Das, Isabelle Casez, Guligo Jia Yanan. Editing Federico Neri. Music Bo Wiget. Sound Design Boby John. Production Design Suresh BV. Animation Nina Sabnani. Producers Alexandra Gerbaulet, Merle Kröger. Executive Producer Meike Martens. Co-Producer Tarshia Dutta. Production company pong film (Berlin, Germany). With Madhusree Dutta, Mi You, Purav Goswami, Devika Hazarika.

Films: 1993: I Live in Behrampada. 1995: Memories of Fear. 1997: Sundari: An Actor Prepares (short film). 2000: Scribbles on Akka. 2002: Made in India. 2005: From Here to Here (co-directed by Philip Scheffner). 2006: Seven Islands and a Metro. 2009: Cinema City Shorts (compilation). 2026: Flying Tigers.