A Review of Battlefield by Borun Thokchom
Watching Battlefield didn’t feel like watching a typical war documentary, given how noticeably different it is in the way it approaches its subject. The film focuses on the Battle of Imphal, one of the most overlooked episodes of the Second World War in Asia. Given the unfamiliarity of this event in popular memory, it isn’t that the film tries to ‘correct’ a version of the event, rather, it builds awareness and understanding around it gradually.
What stood out to me early on was the absence of any attempt to recreate the past through dramatisation, which is what I initially expected of such a film. Instead, it is to the land and landscape of Manipur that the film keeps returning—the hills and forests, the uneven ground, the density of the trees, the stillness of it all. Initially, encountering these spaces feels somewhat distant; yet slowly, they begin to feel layered, connected to everything that we were learning about the war. One sequence that especially stayed with me was the one when people go into the forest to collect bullets and shrapnel left behind from the war. They move through the space with familiarity, scanning the ground, knowing where to look, bending down to pick up shell fragments from the soil, from decades ago. To watch such a sight is to realise that here, the past isn’t quite over, but continues to exist embedded in the very soil, merged into everyday surroundings for people to still encounter.
The interlocutors in the film carry that forgotten history forward in their own way. Their accounts move across different layers of memory, some based on direct knowledge, others shaped by second-hand testimonies and stories. Pauses and slight shifts mark moments where details remained unclear or incomplete. That unevenness appears like a true representation of the workings of memory: not as a fixed and static record, but as living accounts that change form as they are passed on from person to person, generation to generation. Some elements assume sharper form, while others fade away with time; nothing appears as fully certain, yet it carries the weight of truth. The war’s presence is felt through all these voices, in how it is still remembered and spoken about across the decades.
As the film proceeds, the scale of what happened at Imphal becomes clearer, building through accumulation rather than explanation. Each return to a place, each voice, each object adds something to that understanding. At the same time, I became more aware of how uneven global memory is. The Battle of Imphal was clearly significant, yet it didn’t occupy much space in the widely-known narratives of World War II. The film doesn’t state this directly, but its clear focus makes that glaring gap all too visible. It made me think about how certain histories assume central importance, while others are relegated to the margins, and how the difference between the two shapes the way we understand the past.
At the same time, the film avoids presenting history as something that could be fully recovered or neatly understood. There is no attempt to create a complete or definitive account. It works with what remained, in memory, in stories, and in the landscape itself. The gaps are left as they were, keeping the focus on what is still present and visible. By the end, the film left me with a kind of responsibility. After spending time with these places, these voices, and these remnants of times past, it became difficult to go back to thinking of history as something distant or settled. What felt unfamiliar at the beginning didn’t stay that way. It became specific, located, and harder to overlook. Battlefield left me with new knowledge about the past and also the awareness that paying attention to forgotten histories is what keeps it from disappearing altogether.
–Written by Diva Jain, 1st year, B.A. Hons. Journalism and Media Studies