A Karbi-language film from Assam filled a German cinema on 17 October. Its international audience did not need to understand the words to follow the story. The film was KangboAloti, or The Lost Path, a feature film in Karbi from the hills of Karbi Anglong in Assam. Almost nobody in the room spoke the language. Yet they understood it. They saw the fear in a young man’s eyes and felt the weight of a teacher’s silence. Many of them knew, or could imagine, what it means to live with violence, memory and an uncertain future. The film received enthusiastic applause from the audience.
Directed by Khanjan Kishore Nath, the film opened the heARTblicke International Film Festival on 17 October in Heidelberg, Germany. The theme of this year’s festival was “Stories Tell Us”. The screening took place at Karlstorkino, a cinema with a long record of supporting independent and politically engaged films. For a Karbi film to open an international festival in Germany is a statement. It raises questions about who gets to be heard and where.
heARTblicke is a German film and cultural initiative. It uses cinema, conversation and community storytelling to explore crises, migration, inequality and social justice. Its 2026 Film Days brought together films from India, Tunisia, Egypt, the United States and Germany. Leyla Bouzid’s Tunisian family drama À voix basse (In a Whisper) followed the opening film. Other films included Rania Stephan’s Egyptian tribute, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni; Ambalika Khadria’s American film, 49 to 51; and Debarun Dutta’s Berlin-set The Delivery Guy. Samir Nasr’s Egyptian prison drama, Sharaf, closed the festival. Audio stories and short documentaries made by Heidelberg residents connected these works to everyday life in the city. The aim was to make hidden stories visible and initiate conversations.
KangboAloti had already travelled widely. It was screened at the Kolkata International Film Festival, the Bengaluru International Film Festival and the Indian Film Festival of Stuttgart, where it won the Best Feature Film award. At Cannes in 2025, the London-based UK China Film Collab acquired its distribution rights. Yet when the film opened commercially in Karbi Anglong on 17 October, much of the rest of Assam had still not seen it. That gap between the festival circuit and the home audience is familiar to many films from the Northeast.
KangboAloti follows a young boy, Longsing, played by Harmony Bey. He is a young militant sent undercover to a village. His job is to gather information and recruit support for an armed group. He must remain unnoticed. In the village, he meets Birensing, a teacher whose presence complicates everything. Birensing represents education and a life not governed by fear. But the film does not portray him as a hero who rescues a confused boy. Instead, it asks a harder question: What pushes a young person towards an armed group in the first place?
The answer lies in scarce educational opportunities, unemployment and pressure from organisations that claim to represent the community while demanding loyalty from its sons. Behind all this lies a long history of political neglect. Longsing’s choices are shaped by that history, by poverty, by fear and by the limited freedom available to the village. The film shows how political violence enters ordinary life. It enters a classroom. It finds its way into conversations between neighbours. It hides in the pause before an answer and in the silence of a parent who cannot express what they fear.
The film runs for 108 minutes. It is made in Karbi and contains no songs. KangboAloti asks viewers to watch differently. It encourages them to notice how a pause becomes an argument and a withdrawn hand becomes a sign of distrust.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion titled “Histories of the Unresolved”. It brought together the film’s director, Khanjan Kishore Nath; activist and writer Harsh Mander; researcher and writer Tonmoyee Rani Neog; and moderator Ayon Mukherjee. The discussion moved from the film to the longer history of land, autonomy and the political settlements that India left unfinished. The panel treated the film as a work of art that had opened up a serious conversation.
Neog asked Nath why he had made a film in Karbi when he does not speak the language. His answer described his filmmaking approach. Without fluency in the language, he relied on what could be seen and staged: the landscape, physical spaces, silence, and the ways people move and touch one another. He did not need characters to explain politics through dialogue. The film is stronger for it. The distance forced him to adopt this discipline, but it also gives greater force to the film’s political arguments. A village reveals its condition through the way people walk, wait and avoid one another.
This is a lesson worth remembering. Indian cinema often mistakes dialogue for depth. Characters explain what they feel, sometimes at length. KangboAloti takes another route. When a filmmaker cannot rely on a familiar language, the images have to carry more meaning. The result feels restrained but deeply affecting. The audience arrives at the emotions on its own. That may be why people in Heidelberg responded so strongly to KangboAloti.
State control runs through the film, though subtly. Mander described it as an everyday condition across much of Northeast India. It is visible at checkpoints on ordinary roads and in convoys moving through villages on ordinary days. Over time, it becomes habitual, and people begin planning their lives around the possibility of danger. The film captures this without turning it into a spectacle. It shows the expectation of violence and how fear becomes part of the landscape. Mukherjee added that, for communities living under prolonged militarisation, control is already embedded in the ways people move, speak and remember. Everyday life becomes political because it has been militarised. Policy documents can describe this only to a certain extent. It takes art to show what it feels like to live with uncertainty every day.
The panel also raised the issue of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, commonly known as AFSPA. The law applies differently across states and districts, but its shadow falls over much of the region. It grants wide-ranging powers to the armed forces with limited accountability and sustains an order in which security often takes precedence over civil rights. The state can enter people’s lives with exceptional force, often with little accountability for its actions.
The Northeast is often described as a collection of separate problems. Each state has its own insurgency, ceasefire, development scheme or dispute. Yet AFSPA has helped create a shared experience. It has shaped how generations understand citizenship, belonging and power. This is why KangboAloti matters beyond Karbi Anglong. Its questions concern dignity, representation and the right to live without fear. These are not merely Karbi questions; they concern the entire Northeast.
The hill districts carry a long inheritance of broken promises. That history cannot be reduced to a list of grievances. It concerns the repeated failure of the Indian state, and often of mainstream Assamese political culture, to honour commitments on autonomy, land, identity and representation. Militant politics cannot be understood in isolation from this history. Armed movements grow in conditions created by neglect, betrayal and the denial of dignity.
One of the sharpest questions raised during the panel was: Who owns the land, and who decides? Land is territory. It is also ancestry, livelihood, memory and a burial ground. To ask who owns it is to ask who defines belonging. It is to ask whose history counts and who can remain rooted in a place while another is treated as a stranger in their own home. Answering these questions requires a political settlement that takes indigenous autonomy seriously. The state would have to stop treating autonomy as an obstacle to administration. KangboAloti offers no final answer. Instead, it shows the human cost of leaving the question unresolved.
Films from the Northeast often remain confined to the festival circuit, small halls or specialist audiences. They are praised as ‘regional cinema’ and then left on the margins. This creates the impression of a smaller India, while Hindi cinema is considered to belong to everyone. But Karbi, Mizo, Bodo, Meitei, Assamese, Khasi, Nyishi and other languages are living tongues. They carry grief, memory and claims to land. When films in these languages lack proper distribution, promotion and screening opportunities, India loses a way of seeing itself.
National public culture tends to treat the Northeast as distant, troubled or exotic. The region enters the news through stories of insurgency, border security and floods. Its people are often asked to explain themselves before they are allowed to tell their own stories. KangboAloti refuses that demand. It does not turn Karbi life into folklore or seek pity by portraying its people as helpless. It shows a young man caught between ideology and conscience. It depicts villages living with checkpoints, armed authority and the memory of violence. The film is difficult, unconventional and artistic on its own terms.
After the Heidelberg screening, producer Ranjit Teron, editor Sersumbi Terang and Harmony Bey joined the panel online. An audience member asked Bey what had drawn him to the character of Longsing. Had he grown up with the militant history of Karbi Anglong? Had he heard stories from elders? Bey said he had not lived through those events or witnessed that violence. What moved him was the desire to understand a past handed down through fragments and silence. He built Longsing’s character from the script and his imagination. He was drawn to a history he had not witnessed but felt he could not ignore.
That is an important point about memory. It does not belong only to those who lived through an event. It also rests with those who inherit what came after, often carrying its weight. Bey’s performance becomes a kind of imaginative recovery. He reaches towards a past that remains unfinished and asks what it might feel like to carry an ideology before understanding its human cost. In that sense, the film is about how history shapes those born after it through inherited fear, silence and unanswered questions.
India needs to stop treating cinema from Northeast India as a regional curiosity. It needs to fund, exhibit, preserve and engage with it. It also needs to listen. A film from a hill district in Assam should not have to cross continents to prove that it matters. It should be able to speak at home, in its own voice, and be heard there.
Longsing never finds his way back, and the film does not pretend he will. Indian public culture faces a similar problem. It keeps searching for the periphery but rarely arrives there. In Heidelberg, a full room met KangboAloti halfway, without a shared language. The rest of the country may need longer.