Film & Talk: „Flying Tigers“ von Madhusree Dutta

In the organizer's words:

At the invitation of Prof. Philip Scheffner, Madhusree Dutta is returning to the KHM to present her new film "Flying Tigers". The documentary premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this year. In the winter semester 2023/2024, Madhusree Dutta began developing this film, her first documentary in almost twenty years, as part of a fellowship scholarship. In the meantime, the Indian filmmaker was the founder and director of Majlis, a center for interdisciplinary artistic practice in Mumbai, as well as the director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne from 2018 to 2021.

"Flying Tigers", Germany/India, 2026, 105 min.
Bengali, Miya, English, Mandarin, German and Polish with English and German subtitles
"Flying Tigers" tells the story of an old woman in India whose Alzheimer's disease brings to light fragments of memory that her daughter, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta, records. After her mother's death, Madhusree Dutta follows the trail of these memories back to the time of the Second World War. In 1942, in the north-eastern state of Assam, the US army set up the first airlift in military history over the Himalayas to support the Chinese city of Kunming, carried out by the Flying Tiger air force special unit. The construction of the massive infrastructure destroyed the ecological balance of the jungle and drove the real tigers as far as the tea plantations of Assam, where the director's mother grew up. In the course of their research, Madhusree Dutta and the Chinese media theorist Mi You, whose friendship could only develop in a third country like Germany, discover a shared historical moment between the neighboring countries with closed borders. They are joined by Purav Goswami, author from Assam, with his artistic exploration of landscape, soil and terrain. "Flying Tigers" is a film about memory, war and infrastructure.