Indian director Lakshmipriya Devi won a BAFTA award on Sunday for her debut feature Boong in the Best Children’s & Family Film category. Made in 2024, the Manipuri-language Boong is the story of a young boy who sets out in search of his missing father. The boy’s quest takes place against the backdrop of Manipur’s recent conflict.
Boong qualified for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards since it was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been shown at several other reputed festivals. Produced by Excel Entertainment, Chalkboard Entertainment and Suitable Pictures, Boong was the only Indian film nominated at the BAFTAs this year.
Boong triumphed over Arco, Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2. Lakshmipriya Devi attended the ceremony in London with her producers Alan McAlex, Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar (who will play Ravi Shankar in Sam Mendes’s upcoming quartet of films on the Beatles).
In the presence of such guests as the Prince and Princess of Wales, Devi began her acceptance speech with the Manipuri greeting khurumjari. Boong is a film that is “rooted in a place which is very troubled, very much ignored and very unrepresented in India”, she noted.
Devi added, “We pray for peace to return to Manipur. We pray that all the internally displaced children including the child actors in the film regain their joy and innocence once again. We pray that no conflict is ever formidable enough to destroy the one superpower that all of us have as human beings, which is forgiveness.”
The ceremony had another Indian presence – Alia Bhatt. The actor-producer presented the award for Best Film Not in the English Language to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, about a director who uses his upcoming project to reconnect with his estranged daughters.
Among the top winners was Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which won six awards.
Anderson won both Best Picture and Best Director for his film about a washed-up revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) who races to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from an old enemy (Sean Penn).
Anderson also picked up the Best Adapted Screenplay award for the movie, which is based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Sean Penn was named Best Supporting Actor. One Battle After Another won awards for cinematography (Michael Bauman) and editing (Andy Jurgensen).
One Battle After Another was locked in a close contest with Ryan Coogler’s horror musical Sinners. Coogler won the Original Screenplay BAFTA for Sinners – the first Black man to do so.
Wunmi Mosaku was named Best Supporting Actress for Sinners, while Ludwig Goransson won the BAFTA for original score.
Robert Aramayo won the Leading Actor award for Kirk Jones’s I Swear, about a Scottish man with severe Tourette’s Syndrome. The Leading Actress award went to Jessie Buckley for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, a fictionalised drama about the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
Hamnet was also named Outstanding British Film. Starring Paul Mescal alongside Jessie Buckley, Hamnet will be released in India on February 27.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein won three awards for production design, costume design and make-up and hair. James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire And Ash won the Special Visual Effects award. The racing thriller F1 won in the Best Sound category.
Zootopia 2 was named Best Animated Film. The other winners included David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin in the documentary category. Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow won the Outstanding British Debut award.
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