Manipuri film 'Boong' becomes first Indian film to win Best Children's BAFTA
Directed by Lakshmipriya Devi and backed by Farhan Akhtar, the Manipuri-language film 'Boong' won Best Children's and Family Film at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards — the first Indian film to take the category in the prize's history.
The Manipuri-language film Boong became the first Indian film to win Best Children's and Family Film at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards, The Hollywood Reporter India reports.
Directed by Lakshmipriya Devi and backed by Farhan Akhtar, Boong tells the story of a young Manipuri boy on a journey to find his missing father. It is the first BAFTA win in any major category for a film in a North-East Indian language — a region whose cinema rarely enters the global awards circuit.
The win matters for several diaspora-relevant reasons. First, it accelerates the recognition that Indian cinema is not synonymous with Bollywood — Manipuri, Malayalam, Tamil, and Marathi-language work has been claiming international category recognition with growing regularity. Second, the BAFTA win positions Boong as a contender on the international family-cinema circuit through 2026, giving North-East Indian filmmaking distribution it does not normally see. Third, the Manipuri diaspora — small but globally distributed, with notable populations in the UK, US, Canada, Myanmar, and the Indian metros — gets a moment of visibility it has rarely had at this scale.
For the broader Indian-origin film community, the win sits alongside four Indian titles on the Oscars Best Picture reminder list for the 2026 awards: Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1, Mahavatar Narsimha, Tanvi the Great, and Tourist Family. The 2026 awards season is shaping up to be the busiest year on the global cinema circuit Indian-language film has yet had.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter India · The Better India.
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