LIAS Film Series: "The Flying Tigers"

Date: Wednesday, 3 June 2026, 7 p.m.

Location: SCALA Arthouse Cinema | Apothekenstr. 17 | 21335 Lüneburg

The Director, LIAS Public Fellow Madhusree Dutta, is present.

In Flying Tigers, director and LIAS Public Fellow Madhusree Dutta combines documentary techniques with essayistic, performative, and animated elements to create a multilayered exploration of memory, infrastructure, and history. The film, which celebrated its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival Forum, links a private family history with the global political and ecological upheavals of the Second World War and their long-lasting effects up to the present day.

The starting point is a disturbing moment from everyday family life: Dutta’s mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, obsessively repeats the phrase “The tigers are coming! Close the windows!” What initially appears to be an expression of cognitive disorientation becomes an epistemological key in the film. Dutta follows this memory trail back to her mother’s childhood in Assam, where she encounters a little-known chapter of war history: the first airlift over the Himalayas, established by the U.S. Army in 1942 to transport military supplies to Kunming in China. The operation of the so-called “Flying Tigers” was a logistical masterpiece – but at the same time a massive intrusion into the landscape, ecology, and social fabric.

The expansion of airfields, roads, and military camps destroyed ecological balances and drove wild animals, including tigers, out of the forests and into the tea plantations and settlements of Assam. The film reveals how these monumental military processes are sedimented in childhood perceptions, fragmented memories, and family narratives. Alzheimer’s appears not as a mere loss of memory, but as a form of reordering: chronologies, scales, and perspective shifts, allowing marginalized experiences to unexpectedly rise to the surface.

In cooperation with Chinese media theorist You Mi, whose family lived on the Chinese side of the airlift in Kunming, and Assamese author Purav Goswami, Dutta develops a transnational perspective on a shared but politically fragmented history. The encounter between these voices – made possible only in a third space outside Asia – reveals the historical fluidity of border regions and contrasts it with the current regimes of nation-state isolation.

Flying Tigers reflects this movement between times, spaces, and scales in its form. Interviews, archival material, letters, animations, and musical sequences come together to form an open, nonlinear structure in which history appears not as a closed narrative but as a dynamic network.

Thus, Flying Tigers becomes a poetic-analytical reflection on thresholds: between memory and forgetting, individual experience and geopolitical logistics, war and everyday life, territory and biography. The film shows how “big history” inscribes itself in quiet, disturbing images of the private sphere – and how, often decades later, it takes effect there once again.

Free admission

2026 | Director: Madhusree Dutta | Germany, India | 105 min.