‘Flying Tigers’: Madhusree Dutta's ambitious essay film plays at the Berlinale

Before it becomes a film about empires and infrastructure, Madhusree Dutta’s Flying Tigers is about whether a confused mind can still tell the truth. In 2015, nearing the end of her life, her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother kept repeating one warning: Close the windows. The tiger is coming! At the time, they were living in Dutta’s Mumbai apartment. The geography made the claim impossible, yet the filmmaker treated it as evidence. She had learnt one thing while caregiving for her mother — Alzheimer’s patients rarely invent events. Rather, their minds distort the chronology or perspective of an event. The question, then, was not why her mother had imagined tigers but when she had actually seen them.

Tracing the riddle led Dutta back to 1940s Assam, where her mother had grown up. There she found its historical setting: during World War II, American planes ferried supplies from Assam to China across the Himalayas along the ‘Flying Tigers’ route, whose massive infrastructure unsettled the jungle ecology and pushed tigers toward human settlements and tea estates. The discovery expanded into Flying Tigers, an ambitious and personal docu-fiction essay that moves between Assam and China.

INVESTIGATING HISTORIES

Premiering at the 76th Berlinale in the Forum sidebar, Flying Tigers marks Dutta’s return to filmmaking after 20 years. A conversation in Germany with Chinese media scholar You Mi during the pandemic widened the project beyond biography. You Mi recognised the war time airlift from the opposite end—her family in Kunming had grown up waiting for those same American planes bringing aid. What had appeared in Assam as ecological disruption represented relief to civilians in China. The film develops out of this contradiction, placing two inherited emotional narratives of the same event into conversation. History in Flying Tigers does not move forward; it leaks sideways. Over the course of its adventurous 105-minute runtime, the film unfolds like a search conducted in public.

For the first time in her filmmaking career, Dutta places herself in front of the camera as she road trips across Assam with researcher Purav Goswami in pursuit of reported crash sites. On the way, they meet an archivist documenting the route’s local memory. From his perspective, the war survives as sound and debris —a thunderous impact, fire in the hills, metal falling from the sky. The wreckage entered village folklore; one aircraft door even found use as a pig-feeding trough. The film treats such remnants as his torical evidence, allowing landscape and objects to carry testimony. In Kunming, those relationships acquire consequence, providing the film’s most direct political afterlife. Through on-screen interviews with a war historian and a surviving veteran, You Mi reconstructs the arrival of supplies—fuel, machinery, clothing and spare parts—that soon circulated into a surplus trade market.

FLUID BORDERS

Stills from Madhusree Dutta’s Flying Tigers fuel, machinery, clothing and spare parts—that soon circulated into a surplus trade market. The informal economy that followed sustained everyday life while simultaneously weakening the Nationalist government, hastening its defeat. Dutta frames this as a butterfly effect: the air route produces an economy, the economy reshapes power, and its pathways persist in contemporary trade networks. Each solution to a crisis generates another system.

The film’s wide historical sweep is matched by a form that eschews conventional documentary grammar. Dutta scripts and stages several moments, continuing the porous boundary between fiction and documentary she explored in her beguiling last feature, Seven Islands and A Metro (2006). As a result, much of Flying Tigers feels less like watching a film and more like walking through an exhibition.

Long takes of the Brahmaputra give way to sudden close details; art installations interrupt the journey; Miya poetry appears along side conversations about displacement under Assam’s Citizenship Amendment Act. Federico Neri’s editing shifts easily between observation and performance, while Dutta’s voice—some times speaking to her mother—ties the fragments together. Shot by Riju Das (All That Breathes), Isabelle Casez and Guligo Jia Yanan, the images carry a dreamlike quality that invites viewers to inhabit the spatial experience. This hybridity is not just ornamental. Dutta treats it as her working method. Blending archival material, staged performance, interviews, animation and musical sequences, Flying Tigers builds meaning through accumulation, where dates recur as markers across decades and vantage points keep shifting.

The film constantly foregrounds acts of mapping—in one scene, we see Goswami layering soil, pigment, photo raphs, and text onto charts only to erase them again—as if to demonstrate the instability of borders themselves. No frontier is directly shown; instead, it is performed through language shifts, songs that cross linguistic boundaries, and histories told from different positions along the same route. As the film moves between Bangla, English and Mandarin, testimony, travel and archival fragments gradually align into patterns that the viewer must recognise, mirroring the film maker’s own process of discovery. In doing so, Flying Tigers turns form into argument: history is not a fixed narrative but something continually assembled from overlapping memories, cultures and movements. In that sense, Flying Tigers leaves viewers with a changed orientation toward time.

Watching it begins to feel like participating in a mild detective exercise: the full picture emerges only when clashing perspectives and disparate fragments are pieced together. The tiger that opened the film is no longer a mystery to be solved but a way of looking — a reminder that memory often notices consequences long before history records causes. Dutta suggests that wars do not simply end; they reorganise landscapes, economies and relationships until they become ordinary. What remains are intimate, intergenerational afterlives rather than conclusions. The present is simply where the past continues.

Poulomi Das is a Goa-based writer and critic.