'Battlefield' Brings Home the War the World Ignored
By Manu Shrivastava
Manipuri film Battlefield sits in a rare and compelling space where history, memory and a region’s unspoken grief collide, and when placed alongside the world’s most powerful war documentaries, its quiet urgency becomes even more striking. The 80-minute documentary, officially selected in the non-feature section of Indian Panorama at IFFI 56, revisits the 1944 Battle of Imphal between the Allied Forces and Japan.
What Director Borun Thokchom attempts in Battlefield is not the reconstruction of a war but the reconstruction of an absence. The Battle of Imphal, one of the most decisive turning points of the Second World War in Asia, has somehow slipped through the cracks of public memory. While Europe’s war scars have been documented, displayed and taught for generations, and the Pacific theatre immortalised through grand narratives and sweeping cinematic arcs, Manipur has remained a forgotten front. Thokchom’s film reopens that neglected wound and, in doing so, joins a lineage of documentaries that question myths of glory, victory and remembrance.
 | |
|
Unlike Western works such as Shoah, where Claude Lanzmann refuses reenactment in favour of raw testimony, Battlefield anchors itself in landscapes that still carry the weight of fallen soldiers, hillsides where bullets were exchanged, villages where memories are inherited rather than learned. Yet unlike Shoah, its trauma is not supported by institutional memory; it is a history remembered by those who were never taught it in school, a history sustained only by locals who live with its residue. In this sense, the film’s fragility becomes its power. It is a documentary fighting not just to tell a story but to keep that story from disappearing.
The long and patient research behind the film gives it a texture similar to works like The Act of Killing, where the passage of decades has twisted history into something both intimate and political. But while Joshua Oppenheimer’s film deliberately stirs performative confessions, Battlefield leans into the opposite: a tenderness that emerges from people who have never been asked to tell their part of the world’s biggest war. Their reflections are not dramatic; they are weary, grounded in lived landscapes where craters, bones and memories remain embedded in the soil. Thokchom does not shock the audience; he unsettles them with the knowledge that history is not only what nations choose to celebrate, but also what they choose to forget.
Some of the film’s most resonant qualities echo the contemplative pacing of The Burmese Harp and the reflective sorrow of Letters from Iwo Jima, both of which questioned what it means to fight on foreign soil, far from home. Battlefield goes one step further by showing what it means for war to come to your home and leave without cleaning the blood from the doorstep. It is a war told by the land itself. Manipur is not a backdrop; it is both witness and survivor, and Thokchom's camera seems aware that the terrain carries as much testimony as the people who walk it.
 |
| Co-producer and researcher Dr Radheshyam Oinam interacting with the audience after the screening |
Where the film diverges sharply from other celebrated war documentaries is in its emotional duality. It is not merely a search for what happened during WWII; it becomes an indictment of how little the world has invested in remembering what happened here. Unlike the global reverence accorded to Normandy or Hiroshima, Manipur receives little more than a footnote. This imbalance becomes the film’s ethical centre, much like the way Night and Fog interrogates Europe’s selective memory of violence. The documentary refuses to let the audience walk away with only a sense of tragedy; it makes them question the political choices behind remembrance itself.
The film’s modest production scale is both its limitation and its charm. Without sweeping aerial shots, hyper-real reenactments or orchestral cues, it positions itself in the older, purer tradition of documentary filmmaking where stories matter more than spectacle. This restraint aligns it with films like Restrepo, which foreground the lived realities of conflict instead of the theatrics of war. But Battlefield brings its own distinctive vulnerability: it speaks for a region where war never truly ended, where the echoes of one conflict folded into the anxieties of another, more contemporary struggle. That layered narrative makes it feel alive, evolving, almost unfinished, as if the film itself is a living memory still in the process of forming.
In the backdrop of the great war documentaries of our time, Battlefield does not try to compete with scale or grandeur. Instead, it insists on something far more unsettling: that the most important stories of war may be the ones the world has refused to see, the ones that never made it to global textbooks or monuments. It is a reminder that history’s silences are as deliberate as its commemorations.
In giving Manipur a place in the global map of WWII remembrance, Thokchom’s film doesn’t simply document a forgotten chapter; it asks why it was forgotten in the first place. And in doing so, Battlefield becomes not just a documentary about war, but a documentary about the politics of memory itself - a powerful, quiet, necessary intervention in how the world chooses to remember its past.
To receive regular updates and notifications, follow The Draft News:
