Forest gump: The story of India's only film in the Wancho language

A car winding down a lush green mountain road, John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads playing inside, a plastic pine tree swaying on the dashboard... Nilanjan Dutta's feature The Head Hunter begins innocuously and you don't think anything of the car lurching abruptly, sending the toy scuttering. The camera pans out and you see that the car has driven over some stones laid out in a circle on the smooth road and what looks like a conical woven basket, while from behind the trees bordering the road, you catch a glimpse of a scantily-dressed man rushing out. It's only at the end that you realise this seemingly unremarkable scene is not the prelude but the climax of the film, the denouement of an elaborate charade of betrayal that's no less tragic for the understated, realistic way it is portrayed.

The target of this charade, the eponymous head hunter of Dutta's film, is Apu, an elder of the Wancho tribe, a small, once-fierce community of head-hunters that lives mostly in Longding district, Arunachal Pradesh, bordering Myanmar. Apu is wiry, dressed only in a loin cloth wound over a thick twine belt around his waist, with elaborate tattoos covering his body. He seems to be something of a guardian spirit of the dense, primeval forest, roaming freely with only his machete for protection. He sleeps in the hollow of a large tree and eats whatever fruit grows in the forest – some of which he feeds the wild elephants, and every morning, propitiates his ancestors with stones and chants.

This idyll is broken when the government decides to route a road through the forest. Apu sends away the team sent to survey the landscape, telling them the forest belonged to him, that his ancestors had lived there for centuries. The engineers debate whether to send the police to arrest Apu, but one of the surveyors, a young Wancho who'd moved to the city, got an education, job and lost his tribal ways, intervenes and assures his bosses that he will find a peaceful way around the problem. Does he succeed?

Dutta's film is a universal political and humanitarian drama about the contrary pulls of nature and development. "It has resonances in many conflicts across India and the world, since our forests also happen to be the places with the richest natural resources," says Dutta, who received the award for Best Wancho film at this year's National Film Awards. This was the only Wancho language film in contention.

"In fact, it's the first Wancho film to ever be made," says Dutta. The Head Hunter is also only the third film ever made in the remote northeastern state, which does not have a single cinema hall, adds Dutta, who grew up in Arunachal seeing old tribals like Apu wandering a little lost around the markets.

Dutta, who also teaches film editing at the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) and directed the documentary Bhanga Gara, which won the national award for Best Film on Environment in 2007, says he had this script since 2006, but lack of finances meant he could only work on it in bursts and spurts. "The bulk of the finances, around Rs70 lakh, came from Rajiv Nag, a software consultant in Delhi who has no connection with the film industry, and Dheeraj Singh, a former production manager now into event management, who believed in the film," says Dutta. The Head Hunter was shot over a short 22-day schedule in the Nameri Tiger Reserve in Assam. The Naga rebel-infested Longding disctrict was too unsafe to shoot in.

The piece de resistance in the film is clearly Apu, the old man whose spare form and expressive eyes convey child-like innocence, and later, a bewildered hurt that does not comprehend the corrupt ways of the world. So it is astonishing to learn that Noshaa Saham, who plays the old man, is a non-actor. "This is his first performance in front of the camera. The only preparation he had was a workshop I did with him before the shoot," informs Dutta.
The Head Hunter premiered at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival last year, was part of the Indian Panorama section at the last International Film Festival of India, the Pune International Film Festival and got a special mention at the International Film Festival of Kerala in March. An American agent has picked up the worldwide rights for 15 years, says Datta.

Now if only the producer could recover some of the money he's put into the project.