Showing posts with label Mizo Movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mizo Movie. Show all posts

The Lunglei love story

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September 16, 2012

~Sanjukta Sharma


The story behind the biggest ever Mizo film, a tale of star-crossed lovers, and its 38-year-old guerrilla film-maker



Filming in progress at Lunglei. Photographs by Mapuia Chawngthu

Until recently, Mapuia Chawngthu was just a wedding photographer of repute in the small town of Lunglei, Mizoram, where he lives. He had made two short films, in 2003 and 2010, but the town knew his church nuptial compositions better. Now, with his third film,Khawnglung Run—the biggest Mizo film ever made, with a budget ofRs.11 lakh—attracting audiences all over the state, he is a celebrity.

People curiously spot his lead actor, 24-year-old Alex Lalchhuankima, on the streets of the state capital Aizawl. “It has just gone beyond expectations!” the 38-year-old film-maker almost exclaims on the phone, before cautiously concealing his excitement. Our connection is interrupted frequently. It could be the heavily misty night there, he tells me in Hindi. Mizoram is a dominantly Catholic, English-speaking state. Chawngthu is among few who prefer Hindi over English if you’re not conversant with Duhlian, the local dialect.

Lunglei, which means “bridge of rock”, is 120km south of Aizawl. The bridge is an actual formation over a tributary of Tlwang, the river that flows through Mizoram.

Khawnglung Run is shot by the Tlwang, a river known to be ferocious downstream.

Chawngthu recreates the invasion of Khawnglung, once a prosperous village, in Lusei by the Pawi clan fro’m a neighbouring village in the 1800s. Khawnglung was surrounded by treacherous hills, with only one narrow way to enter it fro’m outside. Every night, seven men guarded this entrance. Once, during the annual Chancharkut festival, when men and women were lost in feasting and drinking, a large group of men fro’m the Pawi clan entered the village and kidnapped its residents, among them a young woman named Thangi (played by Zoremsangi Hnamte). Thangi was an upper-caste woman, being wooed by a young man fro’m the labour class named Chala (Lalchhuankima). Khawnglung Run is about Chala’s battle to rescue his love, which ends in a catastrophic chase on the Tlwang.

The film is shot on the Canon EOS 5D, a versatile camera used for films. Chawngthu has co-written, directed and shot it, with a crew of around 20. He edits at home, where he lives with his 61-year-old mother, on a Mac FCP post-production set-up.




[caption id="attachment_9770" align="alignleft" width="330"] Chawngthu with his home editing set-up[/caption]

Like all promotional trailers, the film’s first YouTube spot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K8J9CcpBrQ) with English subtitles, is a hurried glimpse of Chawngthu’s romantic gaze on his lustrous land. His storytelling is linear and simple, hitting shrill, melodramatic chords in some sequences. The performances show off amateur tricks. But as a film, the visual scheme of Khawnglung Run is much better realized than what Rs.11 lakh would allow in a conventional, multi-hierarchical set-up.

There are some wide, sweeping, poetic shots. The violence is visualized through age-old gimmicks, like red splurting on the camera lens, but the story’s bad-against-good canvas, on which the tragedy is based, is unmitigated. Its breathless pace and rhythm, and a haunting score by C. Lalruatkima, the lead singer of Mizoram’s Battle Cry Band, match its visual beauty—the camera doing wonders with the lilting backdrop of streaming water, slopes and bushes. Chawngthu’s language is pure and lyrical.

Khawnglung Run has been selected by the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, for screening there as an example of self-sufficient film-making. “I don’t see it releasing in a mainstream theatre anywhere, but I am sending it to a host of film festivals all over the world,” Chawngthu says.

“I have heard this story many times. It is supposed to have happened right around here. So I thought, since I have the real location, the same river, the same mountains, why not visualize it my way?” He says not much has changed in the topography of Khawnglung. “Back then we used to pray to the river and the hills. We didn’t have to go to church every day.” Mizoram’s Christian establishment is rigid. “Non-Christian ideas won’t go down very well,” Chawngthu says.

Ironically, the state does not have movie theatres. The few which came up after independence have been unused for almost two decades. So Khawnglung Run is being screened with projection facilities at auditorias across the state, with ticket prices varying fro’m Rs.30 in a village to Rs.200 at, say, a swank hall in Aizawl. “There is no film-making culture here, no industry. So the government does not think it’s necessary to revive the theatres. Bollywood also is not very big,” Chawngthu says. He says he has few idols fr’om the world of movies other than some popular Hollywood films he watched while in college in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Subir Bhaumik, a former BBC correspondent and former editor of the Seven Sisters Post, who has written on Mizoram, says: “The movie-viewing culture in Mizoram is family-centric. People like to watch fr’om home. And now there is a DVD explosion that makes it possible. Korean and Thai films are particularly popular even though there is a language problem.” Mizos are known for their penchant for music—many Mizo bands perform outside their state and the region—and like some other states fro’m the North-East, its musicians are schooled in Western genres. Singers Judith Lalremruati, Lalthuthaa, the Mizo Idol of 2011, Valentina Gangte, and writer Lalnunsanga are some of the state’s artistic icons. “Frankly, compared to the success of Mizo boys and girls in national competitive exams like civil services, the state does not have many public intellectuals or creative figures,” Bhaumik says. Incidentally, in the 2011 census, Mizoram’s literacy rate was 91.58%—it is India’s second most literate state after Kerala.

Lalchhuankima, the leading man of Khawnglung Run, has the screen presence of a teen hero, somehow charmingly at odds with his character’s theatrical intensity. He works with Bajaj Allianz in Aizawl; acting is a hobby. In 2010, a National School of Drama (NSD) workshop in Aizawl selected him for the lead role of a Mizo/Duhlian adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which he later performed in Delhi at the NSD’s theatre festival. This is his first major film, he says in a phone interview, “After Khawnglung Run, which taught me a lot about my own culture and about film-making, I want to work in more films.” He is not yet comfortable with his new-found fame in Aizawl.

Lalchhuankima has grown up on local music bands, American pop and hip hop, and is a singer who was among the top 10 of Mizo Idol 2007. “I am very much into Western music. But my favourite actor is Shah Rukh Khan. I want to be an actor like him,” he says.

Chawngthu’s circumstances were dramatically different fro’m Lalchhuankima’s—and it’s not just because of the 14-year age difference between the two men. Chawngthu is a man of the soil who had left for bigger, better opportunities, but who returned to Lunglei and decided to realize his dream there. His father, Jay Prakash Tyagi, an Indian Army jawan—“a subedar major”—was transferred to an army cantonment at Lunglei in “the late 1960s”. Jay Prakash, the young man fro’m Hapur, Uttar Pradesh, fell in love with Baiktluangi, a local girl. They got married and lived in Lunglei for many years before moving back to Hapur in the 1980s.

Chawngthu went to college for about two years in Hapur and returned to Lunglei in 1994 when his father died. “Hindi is like my second language. My UP family is very close to me, so my film may as well have been in Hindi,” Chawngthu says.

He believes the mountains have at least two more stories for him. “After all, who gets to shoot in the location in which stories actually happened?”

Source: www.livemint.com


First big-budget Mizo movie an instant hit

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August 25, 2012

Aizawl, Aug. 24: Mapuia Chawngthu’s long-anticipated film Khawnglung Run ((The plunder of Khawnglung) was released here yesterday to packed halls and community centres.

People here, who had been eagerly waiting for Chawngthu’s latest offering since he started the protect two years ago, thronged the film venues — community centres and halls (as there are no cinemas here). Tickets for the inaugural show at the Chanmari community hall sold out within half a day, while another venue, Vanapa hall, was virtually mobbed by viewers.

Being the first “big budget” (more than Rs 11 lakh) production in the Dulian dialect, the lingua Franca of the Mizos, the film was an instant hit, as evident from the applause reverberating in Vanapa hall at the end of the show.

Produced by Leitlang Pictures, Lunglei, the film tells the story of a star-crossed couple against the backdrop of petty feuds between the Pawi and a Lusei villagers in the late 1850s which led to the plunder of Khawnglung village by Pawi chiefs, marked as the bloodiest and cruellest attack in the entire history of the Mizos.

Khawnglung Run’s epic love angle, which has been kept alive through the ages by numerous versions of the story of Chala’s bleak search for the love of his life, Thangi, who had been carried off from the plundered village as a slave by one of the Pawi warriors, was more captivating for the viewers than anything else.



Singer Alex Lalchhuankima did his best to give a spirited rendition of Chala’s evolution from a boyish young Lusei hunter in a happy village to a desperate man hunting for his lost soul mate, while Zoremsangi Hnamte brought Thangi to life on screen with her beautiful earthy looks and her fine acting.

The film was set in a specially created village near the original Khawnglung village, 145km from the capital. The cast and crew spent around six months on the set shooting the film. As history goes, the entire village was burnt down and the people massacred. The set, too, was burnt down, providing the film some of its best shots against the eerie light of the fires and the dancing shadows, while portraying the harsh realities of tribal warfare in the 18th century as well as the nuances of honour and friendship in time of distress among the villagers.

The director told The Telegraph that his objective was to create interest in youngsters about their own history and culture, which he felt, he had achieved through the film.

Many non-Mizo viewers, however, felt that English subtitles were urgently required.

The actors who played the chiefs and warriors were outstanding, particularly, the one who played the role of Thangi’s slave master, who lent the screen the brooding presence of the legendarily feared Pawi raider. Chawngthu said though many of the actors were amateur, some among them, including the female lead, were National School of Drama products.

The theme song was the much-loved old Mizo ballad, Khawnglung Run, which was sung by C. Lalruatkima supported by the Battle Cry Band. Kima Chhangte was the music director while voice recording was done at Small World Multimedia, Serkawn, Lunglei. Another unique feature of the film is that it was produced totally at Lunglei.

Chawngthu said the film would take time to break even as the budget was high, but he planned to take it to several film festivals. He was confident that he was true to his calling as a filmmaker, which was to entertain. “The public find my film entertaining and this is enough to make me happy,” he said.

~The Telegraph/ Linda chhakchhuak

 
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