For years, Bollywood’s favourite ‘badlands’ lay along the UP-Bihar belt of dusty highways and men with guns and grudges. Now, that compass is swinging North-East, once barely on the mainstream filming map.

In just three years, the region has become the backdrop for Hindi cinema and streaming’s biggest crime and thriller titles. Filmmakers are digging into folklore, cross-border politics, forest corridors, trafficking routes and scenarios where drug deals are struck, ministers beheaded, borders breached, and relationships tested. Basically, a fresh set of tensions and terrain for filmmakers to tap.

‘Anek’ director Anubhav Sinha’s conversations with his Tai Chi teacher from Nagaland led him to explore the churn caused by the stalled 2015 Naga Peace Accord to questions of identity. Varun Dhawan-starrer ‘Bhediya’ draws from Arunachal’s shape-shifting werewolf lore, Kangna Ranaut’s ‘Emergency’ was shot across Assam, including Kaziranga and Karbi Anglong, and ‘Fighter’ staged key action scenes at the Tezpur Air Force Station.

And then came the OTT surge. ‘Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke’ shot in Meghalaya’s dense Tura jungles, ‘Paatal Lok 2’ filmed deep across Kohima using Nagamese and local actors. ‘The Family Man 3’ was set in hill and border towns like Kohima, Khonoma, Jakhama, and Jotsoma.

If you ask Simanta Shekhar, chair of the Assam State Film Finance and Development Corporation, this shift was enabled by the building of key infrastructure like roads and airports. The region is also not the tinderbox many outsiders still imagine. “There is less instability and crime indices are low, and people roam till midnight.” He adds, “Almost all the north-eastern states have a woman-centric society, which is reassuring to cast and crew who tend to ask, ‘kitna safe hai?’”

James Handique, the go-to line producer who facilitates shoots in the region, agrees. “People haven’t faced any tensions during shoots,” he says. Only Manipur, with unpredictable shutdowns, remains sensitive.

Where the region still lags is logistics. “Accommodation, availability of equipment and transport often decide whether a production stays or shifts mid-shoot to Thailand or Malaysia which have similar terrain,” explains Handique, adding that govts are now expanding homestays, developing community tourism projects, improving roads and investing in film infrastructure.

“Compared to 2011, a lot has changed,” he says, but flying in 300 people from Mumbai is still pricier than shooting in Bangkok.

It’s why, for decades, Handique’s memories of filming in the region were limited to “a few sequences of the film ‘Koyla’ in Arunachal”. Oddly enough, it was reality TV that broke the ice.

“When MTV Roadies rolled into Nagaland, Assam and Arunachal around 2011-12 with a large crew and long schedule, they were amazed. They discovered three distinct visual worlds. Sikkim and Arunachal with snow-capped mountains, Assam with the Brahmaputra plains and rice fields, and Meghalaya with its caves and waterfalls.”

The big wave arrived after the pandemic, when the UP-Bihar template had been stretched thin. The NorthEast — visually spectacular, culturally layered — became an obvious next frontier.

When filmmakers dwell on the region’s darker side, Simanta doesn’t object, as long as the storytelling is fair. “They can show it, but in a positive way of how it’s tackled,” he says. Handique says that The Family Man 3’s depiction of Nagaland as a corridor for narcotics moving from Myanmar “is not factually wrong at all”. If done responsibly, he says, it “can bring the right kind of attention and awareness.”

States have sharpened their pitch. Assam’s new film policy — awaiting cabinet approval — promises “lucrative subsidy” and faster permissions. To help writers explore the region’s hidden histories and tales, Handique says a new writers’ room is forming. “I’ve handpicked regional writers and experts and connected them to national creative teams.”

Folklorist and Guwahati University professor Meghna Choudhury — part of this writers’ bench — hopes filmmakers begin noticing more than “forests, insurgency and inaccessibility”. Locals ensure that the nuances are captured right. For instance, filmmaker Tiakumzuk Aier doubled up as dialect coach, teaching Nagamese and fixing “small details” like names and pronunciation. His troupe from Dreamz Unlimited — among Nagaland’s biggest YouTube channels — turned up in force.

Aier himself appears as a cop in ‘Paatal Lok’ and a Naga minister in ‘The Family Man’. The unit, Handique says, had a crew of 2,000 per day, “out of which 200-300 were locals which gave them experience and training”. Anungla Longkumer joined ‘Paatal Lok 2’ as cultural consultant and was involved in things like scanning the script to making sure costumes of Naga tribes were in the right style and colours. On set, she had authority to remove anything that might “hurt the sentiments” of their communities.

She now wants writers to look beyond familiar tropes. “The region is far more than the headhunter or warrior tribe stereotype.”