The filmmaker's story

The world was her imagination as she recalls of her childhood, exploring the streams and mountains, looking for wild berries and swinging in the forest with her siblings and cousins. But it is mostly with a sense of nostalgia that Vikeyeno Zao begins by saying, “the beauty of Kohima is gone forever” and adds to it that “those times were like a magical world as we would say it today.”

While such memories are reflective of her roots, she has been more popularly known for her participation in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for two consecutive years during 2010 and 2011 where a short film directed by her on the head hunting Konyak Naga tribes of northern Nagaland and the other on man and elephant conflicts of Assam were selected for the 63rd and 64th Cannes Film Festivals respectively.

Filmmaking, for her, is a wonderful and fulfilling medium with lots of imagination and empathy when probing into the depths and getting into real meaning of life, even as she goes on to express that “it is a learning process that makes me truly alive.” Movies, she says, “have been around for quite a long time, entertaining people since its inception”. You can take people on a journey and show them a world they can get lost in. It’s quite fascinating and exciting, she states.

When asked of her struggles and what it took to get where she is, she spontaneously responds with, “Life itself is a big challenge and struggle if we look into, very closely” and gets practical even as she shares, “getting into a movie industry is tough very tough. I have struggled through the minutes to get 100 percent perfection.”

She, however has fulfilling memories of making the short film on elephants and deliberates on it saying, “we had to wait in the jungles for hours altogether, sometimes the whole night…my son would always go with me and I remember by 3:00 pm he would start packing his back pack with eatables, other necessary things, and never forgot his torch light. Sometimes we walked 10 to 15 kilometers on a rough terrain, but I never felt that I have walked that much.”

This period, she terms as very exciting and an adventure of a lifetime even as she narrates further an incident of a herd of elephants eating the paddy while the villagers were making terrible sound trying to chase them away… Slowly, she says, the herd moved back to the jungle and suddenly, a leopard appeared sitting on top on a huge stone. “The scene was so dramatic”, she adds while picturing the herd of elephants on one hand and the group of people shrieking on the other side amidst a big leopard and further on the western side three elephants trying to defend their herd from the deadly humans and in between the female elephants forming into a circle to protect their young babes. “I could not get a single picture and my husband could not film it properly of the rowdy crowds pushing from all sides. This is a real moment we missed”, she states regretfully.

“I don’t know how I got into films but I think it was always there in me, to do something nice and great, and to achieve that something is still obscure in the air”, she confesses. But if there is something she has observed in the filmmaking scenario in the state, then, she is clearly hopeful, for she says, “we are lucky to have a lot of film makers coming up today. We are still very young and have a lot to learn including myself from the world around us but reading the thoughts of our youngsters, we have a good future in film making.”

Before venturing into the profession, the acclaimed filmmaker had earlier acquired Diploma in Direction and Cinematography from Asian Film and Television Institute, Marwah Studio Complex, Film City, Noida, India.

Also with a lot of fine experiences in the field of broadcasting media, she has previously done several interview based programmes on different personalities in the radio programme- “Morning Echoes” and was also a regular announcer for All India Radio, Kohima, Nagaland besides compeering western music programme for Vividh Bharati, New Delhi.

As a film maker, she has to her credit, numerous documentary films, tele-films and serials on nature and environment of North East India as well as on social and anthropological aspects of the different tribes of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. She is currently working on a film project since the past one and half years, besides another documentary titled, “Where will I Go Now”.