Tahaan: A Boy With A Grenade

»Who does this land belong to?« is the key question that a hermit ask the Kashmiri boy Tahaan, promising him that the answer will bring back his beloved donkey, the only reminder of his missing father. The family was forced to sell the donkey due to their financial crisis. Searching for the answer, the boy sets off on a difficult path across the wild and charming Kashmiri countryside, which military conflicts threaten to destroy. It seems that the long sequences of mountains and plains and the frequent detailed shots of water, leaves and the play of light rays as filmed by director and master of cinematography Santosh Sivan, again reflect the key problems of the absurdity of privatising nature and destroying it in military conflicts. And if, according to the director, the visual side of the film itself speaks out, this fundamental question is later repeated not only in dialogues and simple philosophical reflections of local elderly, but also on a metaphorical level – the donkey Birbal, whose return becomes the boy’s sole purpose in life, is merely a metaphor for the senselessness of disputes over privatisation, which are overcome by a child’s attachment, kind-heartedness and friendship.     

The life of the inhabitants of Kashmiri, which, according to one of them, is »a fairytale, a short story about a long journey”, is definitely of central importance in the film, which, at the very beginning, is itself denoted as a “fairytale with fictitious characters and non-fictitious incidents«; the real tragedy of the terrorist attacks is given merely implicitly, via the poetic personal stories of invented characters, above all children. The film-maker thus continues with his characteristic treatment of children’s fairytale stories against a backdrop of military conflicts and with a serious topic, which enables him to transcend the genre of children’s films.   .

In his attempt to retrieve his beloved donkey, the young Tahaan becomes a tool in the hands of local terrorists. But if life really is a fairytale, then perhaps, as Tahaan’s friend says, miracles are also possible. »Tahaan's meaning is different in different languages. In some languages it means 'Merciful', in Bengali it means 'Tolerance', while in some other languages it means 'Curse'. Actually, here, the boy is named Tahaan. « (Santosh Sivan)

Santosh Sivan

Santosh Sivan was born in Trivandrum, Kerala. He has continued the family tradition in cinematography and film direction (following his father and both brothers). He has worked as cinematographer for many years which left a strong mark of visual mastery on all his later directorial projects, from his debut feature Halo (1995) and the following The Terrorist (Theeviravaathi, 1999), Malli (2000), Asoka (2001) and Before the Rains (2007) to his last work Tahaan: A Boy With a Grenade, which focuses on a child’s poetic world caught in the adults’ military conflicts, which he cannot understand.