Cannes 2024: AR Rahman unveils music documentary Headhunting to Beatboxing on Naga people

AR Rahman has been busy working on a music documentary called Headhunting to Beatboxing which he unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival. The award-winning music composer revealed that his music documentary follows the Naga tribe in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland as they heal through music while their state is deep in the depths of violence and bloodshed.

The Oscar and Grammy-winning composer wants the world to see how the people of Naga emerge through a musical renaissance.

Why make a film on Naga people and their music?

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Intrigued on a personal level by the music of northeastern India, he said he was exposed to the same when he visited the annually held Hornbill Festival, a cultural celebration of all the ethnic groups of Nagaland.

AR Rahman told Variety, “I was blown away, the whole story, that we’ve been hearing for years, decades, and suddenly the transformation of young people taking to music and they’re all out in the streets. It was like a dreamland for me. I said, ‘Oh, my God, this exists and nobody knows about it’.”

On how he went about making a documentary on the same, AR Rahman said he got in touch with Rohit Gupta (who has directed the docu-film Headhunting to Beatboxing) who had made the Netflix documentary series The Creative Indians.

“We also adopted an orphanage there to teach music. We teach them strings. They’re much quicker because they have this church choir, so they have music in-built in their process,” Rahman said.

The philosophy behind AR Rahman's documentaryHeadhunting to Beatboxing

On the philosophy behind the film Headhunting to Beatboxing, Rahman says, “Gandhi’s non-violence was such a great statement to the world, an inspiration. How you can achieve freedom through non-violence is one of the biggest achievements in the world. And now the world is so primal and going back to killing and there’s so much suffering happening. And I felt that here is a community which were violent, and not because they wanted to be violent. And they’ve completely moved away. [Now] they have a minister for music. And being a musician, I think it looks like an amazing combination of things, an evolution, which could inspire the whole world. Like anybody can turn into anything. And music plays a great part of it.”