When I told my friend I was going to watch this movie called “Warriors Of The Rainbow”, his first reaction was, “Dude, haha, the name sounds a bit gay, don’t ya think? Rainbow warrior? Seriously?”
Lolz, well, I never thought of it that way. I don’t have anything against gay pride, but that doesn’t mean I must watch gay movies just to show my support to the rainbow movement.
“Noooo idiot, this movie was recommended to me by a friend with whom I share similar taste in movies. He told me to watch it definitely... He’s the same guy who recently told us to watch “The Flowers of War” which you initially thought was gay too because of the FLOWERS but it was an awesome movie, remember?”
He nodded.
Ahh… The Flowers Of War. Such a tear-jerker. One of the best movies I have seen this year.
Whenever I’m about to watch a foreign language film, I always do a quick research online first. The director of TFOW was Yimou Zhang, who directed three of my all-time favorite Chinese language movies - Hero, House Of Flying Daggers and Curse Of The Golden Flower. But I was a bit skeptical as all those movies were during ancient China, whereas TFOW was during Japan’s invasion of Nanking in 1937. Will he be equally good in making a post-modern era movie? Christian Bale was in the movie and it had a good rating on IMDB so we decided to watch it. Oh, what an awesome movie it was!
The conflicts between the convent girls and the prostitutes were captured and portrayed beautifully. The movie depicted humanity at its finest, about how some of us are like savages in the worst of times while others sacrifice themselves for a noble cause. I highly recommend you watch it too.
Now, coming to the topic of this post – Warriors Of The Rainbow.
When we watch something extremely touching, even if we are the most testosterone pumped up male, sometimes a tear involuntarily rolls down our cheek (unless of course you’re some sociopath devoid of any human emotions and feelings). For me, while I was watching WOTR, there were at least more than ten occasions when I had to wipe the tears off my cheeks. The last time something like that happened to me was when I watched Hotel Rwanda many years ago.
WOTR really really touched me because, being a Mizo, I found so many similarities between our Mizo tribe and the Seediq Bales. We’re both head-hunters, collecting heads of the people we killed in battle to display our feat, and at the same time we’re not like the headhunters of Africa where headhunting is more related to cannibalism over there. We both fought against other clans of our tribe regularly, living separately at our respective villages headed by a chief. We have our own territories or “hunting ground”, and we love to celebrate by sitting around a fireplace and getting drunk while dancing with the womenfolk in rhythm to the music beat. The men do the fighting and hunting while the women do the cooking and weaving. We were animists, and the Seediqs believed in something like an afterlife beyond the rainbow.
I know, I know, that is pretty much a common tribal trait across the world, especially a warrior tribe. But watching the movie gave me goosebumps and I had this really strong feeling of kinship with the Seediqs.
The Japanese took a long time to conquer them, wherein they lost thousands of troops against a few Seediq warriors because of their jungle warfare tactic and unconditional courage and love for their homeland. Similarly, the British army took a while to conquer our tribe even though they had far superior weapons and artillery.
The movie is based on a true event called the “Wushe incident”. Well, there’s this recent Mizo movie released in Mizoram about the historical massacre of Khawnglung Run village, which is also based on a true story. Below is a trailer of that movie –
Yes you’ll see so many similarities between the Mizos and Seediqs, though the two film scripts are very different (one is about a struggle to rescue the love of his life, while the other is a struggle to lead the people he loves to freedom from the invading Japanese forces)
Of course there is a huge difference in the production quality of the two trailers displayed above due to the amount of money and talent invested in the projects (plus, the executive producer of WOTR is John-fucking-awesome-Woo). But it really feels good to know the Mizo film industry is coming up this fast.
At Warriors Of The Rainbow, you will see how clans perceive each other, and how people will do anything to protect their land and family. There are awesome fight scenes, and very moving scenes too that will guarantee a tear to fall down.
Do watch it when you can, you will not regret it. I’m ending this short post with a few more pictures of Warriors Of The Rainbow.
Pic source: Rotten Tomatoes
