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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Tales from Our Childhood (Loralir Sadhukatha) is Mukul Haloi’s 69-minute Assamese documentary about what it meant to grow up in 1990s Assam amid ULFA insurgency and Army violence. Made between 2016 and 2017 and listed in the 2018 Mumbai International Film Festival catalog, it approaches that turbulent period through childhood memories, family stories and deliberate reconstructions—not as a comprehensive political history.
What the documentary is about
The film returns to Haloi’s childhood and adolescence in Assam, where memories of violence, death and disappearance shaped family and community life. The Bangalore International Centre framed the question at the heart of the film as what it was like to grow up in 1990s Assam “squeezed between an insurgency and the Army.” The setting was a period in which the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was waging an armed rebellion seeking independence from India, while the Indian Army was also part of the conflict.
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Haloi has described the work as a personal account rather than a political history: “This film was more about my growing up years rather than a political history of Assam,” he told Scroll.in. Its focus is the texture of remembered experience—how conflict entered childhood and relationships—not a full account of the insurgency or counterinsurgency.
How memory becomes the film’s form
Haloi’s own recollection was the starting point. In a 2020 interview, he described it as “a memory — my personal experience of the 1990s as a child and teen, and now me being an adult and looking back at the past.” The film builds outward from that perspective through stories and conversations involving his friends, parents and relatives.
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It also makes its process visible through fragments of remembered life: an old diary, a recited rebel poem and a play rehearsal. One friend poses in a borrowed ULFA uniform. These are staged recollections, not contemporaneous archival footage; the posed image should not be mistaken for a documentary photograph of an actual rebel. The movement between memory and reconstruction is central to how the film evokes the past.
Haloi said he interviewed ULFA leaders and cadres, as well as families of ULFA members, while developing the film’s factual narrative. That account describes his method; it does not by itself establish that every event or recollection is independently verified.
Who made it, and when
Mukul Haloi directed the film and also handled its camera work and editing. The Mumbai International Film Festival catalog lists the School of Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences as producer, and identifies the film as Indian, Assamese-language, 69 minutes long, and from 2017. Scroll.in reports that it was made between 2016 and 2017. A later Bangalore International Centre event listing gives 2018 as the year, so the production period and later listing should not be treated as identical kinds of dates.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the film can—and cannot—offer
Tales from Our Childhood is most useful as a memory-led documentary about growing up within a conflict, and as an example of how staging can give remembered experience a visual form. Its family and social-circle perspective offers a personal route into the consequences of violence. It is not presented as an exhaustive history of ULFA, the Indian Army’s operations, or Assam’s broader political history. Viewers seeking a comprehensive account of the conflict should treat the film as one situated perspective rather than a standalone historical synthesis.
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The documentary appeared in the 2018 Mumbai International Film Festival catalog, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ 2017–2018 annual report records a February 2018 screening and panel discussion. The Bangalore International Centre held an online event from 18 to 27 October 2020; its event page now marks it as over. Scroll.in reported in January 2018 that the film was then streaming on MUBI, but that dated mention does not establish current availability. No current official streaming or licensing page is established here, so check the filmmaker, festival, or institutional event listings for any new authorized screening.
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