“This is my country. I do not belong to this land.” - Interview with Madhusree Dutta

By Dr. Yun-hua CHEN

One of the most beautifully mind-boggling and labyrinthine Berlinale film in 2026 – Flying Tigers, premiered at the Forum, supported by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi and Goethe-Institut China, is a collective quest through history’s butterfly effects, a detective story of history, a collage of found stories and an archive of individuals’ memory. Its hybrid form is uniquely individual and intellectual, as the film drifts from filmmaker’s Alzheimer-plagued mother’s fear of tigers in Assam to multi-location research around the US army unit supplying Kunming in WWII.

YC: Can we start by talking about animals in the film? Tigers, mules…

MD: It’s interesting that you said that. They emerge organically from the story. What interests me, which eventually led to animals, is movement: things that move, and things that do not care about borders. Borders are human-made. As human beings, I need a visa to visit you, but a tiger does not need one. Goods do not care about borders either. What is allowed to move and what is not allowed to move is one of the basic focuses.

In India we never consider the Second World War as our history. It was always presented as European history. We studied it because we had to study European history more than our own. But while the battle may not have happened here, the ports in the non-combative areas experienced immense violence because they were logistical hubs. Logistical operations destroy natural habitats.

YC: And movement is also connected to the old and new routes along the way, like Ledo Road…

MD: I remember speaking to a man in India who belongs to a Himalayan tribe near the Chinese border. He said that they travel using jungle paths. And then someone said that jungles and mountains are not borders; they are bridges.
Borders are placed on roads, highways, autobahns, places where you can put up gates. You cannot put gates in jungles or in the Himalayas.

YC: This is connected to a character’s line: “This is my country. I do not belong to this land.”

MD: It is very interesting that Mi You is my first Chinese friend. Perhaps I have met members of the diaspora, third- or fourth-generation Indians, but not someone who is ethnically Chinese and a Chinese citizen. And somehow we never found that odd as we were taught to believe that China is far east. This is clearly Eurocentric geopolitics.

“This is my country / I do not belong to this land” – I came across this line somewhere online long before I started making the film. I became interested because of the language in which it was spoken or written. I say “written,” though they do not have a script of their own. They write using other scripts, either Assamese or Bengali. It is a hybrid language. I find it very familiar because I am Bengali, but I do not fully understand it; their trajectory has been completely different. They are farmers; they are coastal people. Their spoken language has gone through many other transformations. Then you wonder whether you cannot grasp it because you do not share their experience, or because you do not fully know the language.

These people, called pejoratively Miya, today are on the threshold of being disenfranchised.
That is what he meant when he said, “This is my country,” because he cannot go anywhere else. This is his country, but he has been pushed out – like the tiger in the story, whom the children tell, “Go to China.” So comes the rejoinder – “I do not belong to this land”.

YC: Speaking of these children, can you talk about the songs in different languages in your film?

MD: I tried to make this film as non-informative as possible. I felt I had no information that you could not find within half an hour of research on Google. The film is actually about obscuring information. Today, you get the information you need in five minutes, and then you do not engage with it. The film resists that. I take information and obscure it with stories. That is also why language functions the way it does in the film.

There are two songs that recur in the film. One is the song of infrastructure – a European song written in European languages: Italian, a little French, German, and English. The other song, the Indian song, is in three languages as well: Bengali, Assamese, and Miya.

A German audience member may think they understand, and then suddenly they do not, because a sentence shifts into another language. Same for an Indian person. This linguistic discomfort, this displacement, is part of how language struggles and survives. Language remains traceable, but it transforms continuously. You have to make an effort to follow it. It is historical. And I wanted the audience to experience this physically, to get something and not quite get it.

This is not a simple narrative where you watch the film and “know.” You will not know everything. It is about my mother. It is about the Second World War, much before I was born. But it is autobiographical because all the questions that I faced in my career as a documentary filmmaker are also placed within it. Questions of obscurity and familiarity, of how informative something should be, of how much information one gives and how much information is available. So much information is available that perhaps it is time to hide some of it. So what, then, is the role of the archive?

YC: It is also about memory, about the archiving of memory. And memory concerns what we remember and what we do not remember: the memories that fade away and those that are retained.

MD: My trajectory towards memory, and understanding the logic of memory – how memory survives, how memory functions – begins with the loss of memory. I was trying to understand my mother’s Alzheimer’s. We take it as a tragedy. But in my mother’s case, I tried to understand it as a process of becoming uninhibited. She opened up. She allowed her formerly-prohibited memories to surface.

Before dying, she actually said only one thing: “The tiger is gone.” Whatever I studied about Alzheimer’s suggested that it does not involve hallucinations. This is something I also explain in the film: people with Alzheimer’s never make a new story. They only get confused about where to place the memory.
 

That means the tiger was present in my mother’s life at some point, right? So, I started thinking. And one thing I realised is that memory needs to be allowed. Sometimes it is allowed by society; sometimes by oneself. There is always an external reason why memories surface. Memories do not arise on their own. Memory can, then, also be manipulated, as is said in the film -  everyone today has a memory agenda.
But memory, as an asset or as a narrative tool, has this particular element: it does not simply exist. It has to be opened, and it can also be closed. Sometimes individuals do this. Sometimes we do it ourselves. The tigers had disappeared for a good part of my mother’s life, and then came back because Alzheimer’s allowed them to return.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, author and cultural producer living in India and Germany. Her area 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 center for interdisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai; and former artistic director (2018–2021) of 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.

This article was published in the magazine “Freiraum” of the Goethe-Institut China under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 DE licence.