Berlinale 2026: Flying Tigers

The Berlin International Film Festival 2026 has invited Madhusree Dutta's new film ‘Flying Tigers’ (105 min.) to be part of this year's programme.
The documentary has been selected for the Forum section. The Berlinale Forum ‘sharpen[s] the focus on films of social relevance and as an aesthetic form of reflection. Films by people who take seriously their impact on our coexistence, our struggles, our reconciliation, our history/stories, the experience of community, beauty and solidarity, and the shaping of our social, cultural, ecological and political present and future,’ the festival writes in its programme announcement.

Alzheimer's disease triggers a fragment of memory to surface in an old woman's mind, witnessed by the daughter, Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta. She follows this trail, left by her mother, back to the times of WWII. In the northeastern state of Assam, in 1942 the US Army had implemented the first airbridge across the Himalaya, to send military aid to Kunming in China, carried out by the special air force unit Flying Tiger. The building of an enormous infrastructure destroyed the ecological balance of the jungles, and real tigers appeared in the tea plantations of Assam, where the director's mother

was growing up.

Madhusree Dutta collaborated with media theorist You Mi on her film project Flying Tigers. You Mi received her doctorate from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 2019 and was appointed professor of art and economics at the University of Kassel in 2021. Her research interests include new and historical materialism, performative philosophy, and the history, political theory and philosophy of Eurasia. Monika Rinck, who has been teaching as a professor of literary writing at the KHM since 2023, wrote the text ‘Song of Infrastructure’ for the film music by cellist and composer Bo Wiget.