Beyond the ‘Northeast’ Tag: How Indian Filmmakers Are Claiming a Global Identity

It’s easy to slip into shorthand when you talk about India’s far‑east – “the Northeast”, “the hill states”, “the insurgent zone”. Those shortcuts help news headlines, but they don’t capture what the filmmakers themselves are trying to say. When a film from Manipur is lauded at Cannes, the director often sighs at the moment someone calls it a “Manipuri” or “Northeastern” piece.

Take Aribam Syam Sharma, whose 1990 film Ishanou (The Chosen One) made it to the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. The director has recounted, with a wry smile, how a journalist from Chennai insisted on stamping the film with a regional label. “It was the only Indian entry that year,” he reminded them, “so why turn it into a curiosity about where it was made?”

His earlier work, Imagi Ningthem, won the Montgolfière d’Or at the Festival of Three Continents in Nantes back in 1981. Even then, the applause was for the story’s emotional honesty, not for the fact that it happened in a small town in Manipur.

Across the border in Assam, Jahnu Barua’s Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai (The Catastrophe) swept awards at Locarno in 1988, clinching the Silver Leopard and a special mention from the Ecumenical Jury. Yet Barua recalls being mistaken for a foreign guest at a five‑star hotel in Udaipur during a festival – a mix‑up that highlighted how little people knew about him beyond the film’s accolades.

These anecdotes are not isolated. A fresh cohort of directors – from Meghalaya’s documentary storytellers to Nagaland’s indie feature makers – are navigating the same terrain. Their films get selected for Toronto, Berlin, and Venice, yet promotional material often tacks on “Northeast Indian” as a sub‑category, as if that alone were a selling point.

Why does this matter? Labels can be double‑edged. On one hand, they draw attention to a region that historically got sidelined in the national narrative. On the other, they risk pigeonholing artists, reducing complex, universal narratives to “ethnic” curiosities. The directors we’re talking about want their stories of love, loss, and resilience to be read as human stories, not as ethnographic case studies.

In interviews, many of them stress that the geography of their upbringing informs their eye, but the emotions they explore belong to anyone, anywhere. When a shot of a tea plantation in Assam mirrors a scene of a wheat field in Kansas, the audience should feel the sameness, not the “regional flavor”.

There’s also an economic angle. International co‑productions and festival circuits often allocate funds based on “regional” quotas, which can be helpful but also create a ceiling. Filmmakers worry that once a project is tagged “Northeast Indian”, future financing may be limited to that niche, even if the story aims higher.

So the conversation has shifted from “Why is Northeast cinema finally being seen?” to “How do we stop the conversation from circling back to geography?” It’s a subtle, ongoing negotiation, one that plays out in press releases, award ceremonies, and casual chats over tea.

What remains clear is that the world is listening. Whether it’s a silent short from Sikkim or a sprawling drama from Tripura, the applause is for the craft, for the humanity, not for a map label. The filmmakers, seasoned and new alike, are gently nudging us to move beyond the regional tags and see their work as part of the larger tapestry of global cinema.