In Heidelberg, on October 17, a Karbi-language film from Assam opened an international film festival, HeARTblicke, devoted to stories from situations of crisis. Kangbo Aloti (The Lost Path), directed by Khanjan Kishore Nath, was screened at the Karlstorkino on that day. It asked a European audience to see northeastern India as a place of particular faces, withheld histories, and ordinary people asked to make impossible choices. The event carried a significance that Indian public culture has rarely granted to cinema from Northeast India: a film in an indigenous language, rooted in the political history of the hill tracts of Assam.The HeARTblicke film festival, whose 2026 theme was ‘Stories Tell Us’ chose Kangbo Aloti as its kickoff event. Festivals often treat films from the borderlands of India as regional, folkloric, ethnographic and politically exotic. Kangbo Aloti resists that framing. It is a film made in Karbi, with and by Karbi artists, about a young militant sent into a village to recruit for an armed group. It is also a restrained human drama about conscience, education, love and the slow erosion of certainty. It asks to be watched as a work of art before it is asked to serve as an anthropological document. Kangbo Aloti had been screened at the Kolkata International Film Festival, the Bengaluru International Film Festival, and the Indian Film Festival of Stuttgart, where it won Best Feature Film. Its distribution rights were acquired by the London-based UK China Film Collab at Cannes in 2025.Panel discussion titled ‘Histories of the Unresolved’. Photo: Author provided.Kangbo Aloti follows Longsing, a young militant sent undercover to a village in Karbi Anglong. His task is to gather information and remain unnoticed. The village has a teacher, Birensing, whose work and presence complicate Longsing’s assignment. The film could have easily become a parable about peace, with the militant converted by a good man. It does not. Its concern is the conditions that push young people into armed groups in the first place: scarce schooling, few jobs and the constant pressure of organisations that claim to represent the community while making demands on its sons. The choices Longsing makes are shaped by limited agency. He does not choose in a vacuum, and neither does anyone else in the village. Kangbo Aloti is 108 minutes long, made in Karbi, and has no songs. In an industry where music often functions as emotional shorthand, the absence of songs signals a different cinematic contract with the audience. The film asks viewers to attend to faces, weather, silence, and the physical weight of decisions. It is a feature film that treats restraint as a form of seriousness.A still from ‘Kangbo Aloti’. Photo: Screengrab from YouTube.After the Heidelberg screening, the panel “Histories of the Unresolved” brought together Nath; researcher and writer Tonmoyee Rani Neog; activist and writer Harsh Mander; and moderator Ayon Mukherjee. Their conversation widened the film’s reach. It moved from a single village story to the longer history of Assam, the hill tracts, militarisation, and the unfinished business of postcolonial India. Their discussion placed the film within a history of incomplete political settlements.Neog asked the director why he had made a film in Karbi when he does not speak the language natively. His answer described a method. Linguistic unfamiliarity disciplined the film. Unable to rely on easy verbal fluency, Nath had to build meaning through what could be seen: landscape, gesture, silence, distance and the small movements of people negotiating trust. He had to trust visual storytelling, let landscapes carry meaning, and allow silence to do the work that exposition might otherwise perform. He had to watch gestures closely: a hesitation before an answer, a hand withdrawn, a face turning away, a body stiffening at the sight of a uniform. This is an artistic lesson worth taking seriously. Cinema often mistakes dialogue for depth. Kangbo Aloti suggests the opposite. When a filmmaker cannot lean on the convenience of a familiar language, the image must carry more weight. A look then becomes an argument, a pause becomes a history. More than scenery, hills are a moral presence. Nath’s unfamiliarity with Karbi pushed him toward a more filmic grammar. The power of the film comes from this restraint. A still from ‘Kangbo Aloti’. Photo: Screengrab from YouTube.Mukherjee asked about the presence of state in the film. Mander addressed militarisation as an everyday condition rather than a series of military operations. State control, he argued, is present in check posts on ordinary roads, in convoys that move through villages on normal days, and in the ordinary presence of armed authority that shapes where people go and when. Residents learn to plan around these presences. Their movements become adjusted to the routines of the state. A young man may alter the route, lower a voice, avoid a gathering or choose silence because the possibility of violence has become normal. That adjustment is part of how control works, and it rarely appears in official accounts of an insurgency. The film captures this psychological condition without turning it into melodrama. Mukherjee added that for communities living under prolonged militarisation, state control is already present in the movement, speech and memory. The everyday is political because the everyday has been militarised. The panel together agreed that Kangbo Aloti does not constantly translate Karbi life for outsiders. It allows the unfamiliar to remain unfamiliar, while making its emotional logic legible. This is a rare achievement. It treats viewers as adults capable of meeting a film on its own terms.The panel also discussed the long shadow of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) over the most part of Northeast India. The application of the law may vary across states and districts, but its logic extends across the region. The law grants extraordinary powers to the armed forces with diminished accountability, and it sustains a political order in which security is routinely placed above civilian rights. The Northeast is frequently discussed as a collection of separate administrative problems, each with its own insurgency, ceasefire, or development scheme. But AFSPA has helped create a shared political condition. It teaches generations that the Indian state can enter their lives with exceptional force and limited consequence. A still from ‘Kangbo Aloti’. Photo: Screengrab from YouTube.The panel spoke about the hill tracts’ long inheritance of unkept promises. This history cannot be reduced to a grievance list. It concerns the repeated failure of the Indian state and of mainstream Assamese political culture, to honour commitments around autonomy, land, identity and the political representation. The Karbi Anglong hills have been asked to live with promises that arrive late, arrive partially, or do not arrive at all. The militant politics of the film cannot be understood in isolation from this history. Insurgency grows in soil prepared by neglect, betrayal and repeated denial of dignity. The most forceful contribution of the panel discussion was the distillation of the conflict in the Northeast into a single question: “Who owns the land?” The question is not as simple as it may sound. Land is territory, but it is also ancestry, livelihood, memory, burial, belonging, and the capacity to imagine a future, without permission from elsewhere. To ask who owns the land is to ask who has the authority to define belonging. This question requires a political settlement that takes indigenous autonomy seriously, rather than treating it as an obstacle to administration. Kangbo Aloti does not offer a policy blueprint. It does make the human cost of an unresolved question visible.The film had already begun its commercial release in Karbi Anglong district on October 17, even as it remained unseen in the rest of Assam. To the surprise of many in Heidelberg, Nath was joined online by producer Ranjit Teron, co-producer Amit Singh, and Harmony Bey, the actor who plays Longsing. When an audience member asked Bey what had drawn him to the character, and whether he had grown up amid the militant history of Karbi Anglong, or had heard stories from elders, Bey answered that he had not lived through those events. He had not witnessed that violence. What compelled him was an older, more restless impulse: the desire to know a past that had been handed down in fragments and silence. He inhabited Longsing through the script and his imagination, drawn to a history he had not witnessed but felt he could not ignore. Memory does not belong only to those who have lived through an event. It also rests, often heavily, on those who inherit its consequences. Bey’s Longsing is therefore an act of imaginative recovery. The actor reaches toward a past that remains unfinished, asking what it might feel like to carry an ideology before discovering its human cost. In this sense, the film becomes a meditation on how history continues to shape those born after it – through inherited fear, inherited silence, and unanswered questions. Kangbo Aloti demonstrates what is lost when such films remain marginal. It is a film about how violence recruits the young, how communities survive surveillance, how conscience grows through proximity and how political promises become personal wounds. Longsing is on a lost path, but so is the political order that produced him. The paths out of violence are not obvious. They may begin in a classroom, in a conversation, in the decision not to recruit another young person into a cycle of fear. They may begin when a film from a hill district in Assam is allowed to speak in its own language, on its own terms, before an audience willing to listen. That is why films like Kangbo Aloti demand to be seen. India’s public culture needs to listen to the histories emerging from its Northeast. It needs to fund them, exhibit them, preserve them, and argue with them. Above all, it needs to stop asking these films to explain themselves before it has learned how to see them. The lost path in Nath’s title is not only Longsing’s. It is also the path Indian public culture has failed to take: toward a cinema, and a politics, that can hear the periphery on their own terms.Tonmoyee Rani Neog is a researcher and writer based in Wolfsburg, Germany.Note: Neog was part of the panel, ‘Histories of the Unresolved’, discussed in this piece.