Ishanou (English: The Chosen One) is a 1990 Manipuri film written by M. K. Binodini Devi and directed by Aribam Syam Sharma. The movie stars Anoubam Kiranmala and Kangabam Tomba in the lead roles. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. The movie was first aired in Doordarshan and later released in Usha Cinema, Paona Bazar on 6 July 1990.

Plot

In a small village of Manipur, Tampha, the young and tacitum wife of Dhanabir, works in an office and the couple lead a routine life with their child. But when her husband takes for a ride on a two wheeler through the hilly country to amuse her, she has dizzy spells. She is also seized from time to time by convulsions and she begins to wander at night. One night she reaches the house of an exclusively female and matriarchal religious sect of Maibis, possessors of the previlege of ritual invocations to the gods of the ancient pantheon of Manipur. But her sickness is not one that medicine or even magic can cure. Her possession is of another nature, sacred, in fact, the direct search for the goddess Maibi. Tampha, like in a daydream, leaves everything to become an initiate of the sect. At the end of the film, she meets her husband, who has remarried and her daughter, two people from whom she is now alienated, in the truest sense of the term.