Right budget, platform and creative autonomy can change game for wildlife filmmakersBy Jemima Raman

Bengaluru, Mar 28 (PTI) Now that the din around The Elephant Whisperers’ historical Oscar is settling, an elephant in the room when it comes to wildlife documentaries is crying for attention.

Documentary filmmakers say they can achieve far beyond the “informative documentary” with the right budget and platform as well as creative autonomy.

In the case of “The Elephant Whisperers”, it was Guneet Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment and Netflix which propped up the film for an Oscar win. As for the other gem, “All That Breathes”, which has swept other acclaimed awards, including Sundance and Cannes, London-based production house Rise Films as well as HBO helped it cut to the chase.

For wildlife documentary filmmakers in the country, this could be a game changer.

Gunjan Menon, whose debut film “Firefox Guardian” (2018), was a poignant story of the life of the first female forest guardian to work with Red Panda Network in Nepal, said screenings that come as a part of the film festival circuit had many benefits.

“My films have travelled to more countries than I’ve ever been to and have been dubbed in languages for audiences worldwide. This gives our local stories of conservation a scope to reach wider audiences and who knows, someone along the way might get inspired to take action,” Menon said.

For national award winning Vijay Bedi, a third-generation environmental filmmaker, between the Elephant Whisperers and All That Breathes, the stereotype that wildlife films are “white man’s job” is broken.

“The other best thing is that the much-needed conversation has started in India,” Bedi added.

Rita Banerji, another veteran associated with wildlife films since 1991 is excited about OTT platforms. She has already witnessed first-hand how technology suddenly changed the game for wildlife filmmakers.

For instance, she said the compact and affordable cameras meant that they could spend months in the fields as they did not have to worry about rental fees.

“Accessibility to documentaries is very important. Many of our works are still unavailable for the larger public.” According to her, lack of audience affects the ability to get funding for a project, forcing filmmakers to put in their own money if they want to think out of the box.

That not many are be able to do that is proven by the fact that just a couple of years ago, when compiling a listicle on “10 wildlife short films by Indian filmmakers” for Sanctuary Asia, its commissioning editor Cara Tejpal was stuck at number 7. Although she listed three other films, she went on to say she was conflicted about them and concluded, “I suspect that some of these filmmakers’ skills may have been undermined by their commissioning organisations.”

“I must not be too off the mark, because a crew member associated with one of them sent me a message saying Watching this? It’s a lesson on how bureaucrats can destroy films,” she wrote.

Ironically, when the “info docu” framework is sidestepped, and the director is left to tell the tale as he or she wants, the issue seems to better percolate through to the audience. This was proved by the debate surrounding Elephant Whisperers and All That Breathes.

Some felt strongly that Shaunak Sen “All that Breathes” deserved the award and took to social media to tell why they thought so.

Rakesh Sengupta, film and media scholar and assistant professor at University of Toronto, was one of the informed voices on Twitter defending the film.

“It remains one of the most profound and vital pieces of cinema in recent years. As the political and ecological issues become more entangled, it will be watched and discussed beyond this moment. Scholars will find it generative to rethink some of the abstractions and generalisations of eco-humanities in the Global North. Viewers will find new ways to gaze at the nonhuman world without depoliticising it,” he noted.

But, for Shekar Dattatri, another veteran wildlife filmmaker from Chennai, if a wildlife film really wants to be the catalyst of change, serving the issue straight up to the right people is more effective than making it entertaining. He says real change comes at policy level.

For instance, he pointed out how the slew of welfare measures announced by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, in the wake of the Oscar, for the tribal community that takes care of elephants would not bring about a solution to the existing human-elephant conflicts, the reason why those elephants are being orphaned.

Dattatri said he changed his approach in 2000, after years of making feel-good wildlife films. He added he now makes films for “narrowcasting” films that will make a strong case for why a particular problem needs to be addressed and persuades its target audience to do certain things to resolve it. “Action, and not just awareness, is its goal,” he said.

“The very first advocacy film I made for narrowcasting, a 11-minute video called Mindless Mining The Tragedy of Kudremukh (2001), played a pivotal role in turning the tide of political and public opinion against a highly destructive opencast iron-ore mining operation within the Kudremukh National Park in the Western Ghats.”

The film was made in English and Kannada and was screened to political leaders, senior members of the bureaucracy, farmers downstream from the mine, religious leaders who had their places of worship along the Bhadra River, and renowned literary figures in the state, who amplified its message and added their voices, he said.

“The success of Mindless Mining in changing hearts and minds reinforced my belief that what matters in advocacy filmmaking is not the number of viewers, but who those viewers are. The more powerful they are, the fewer you need to reach in order to resolve a problem,” added Dattatri.

But the power of broadcasting cannot be denied too. In the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring Al Gore’s slideshows on climate change, which turned the tide for the debate, Gore said: “If the issue is not on the tips of their constituents’ tongues, it is easy for them (politicians) to ignore it, to say well, we’ll deal with that tomorrow’.”

What better than a bit of warmth, like in The Elephant Whispers, the profundity of All That Breathes or the humour of Banerji’s Gaur In My Garden to engage a wider audience, who could in turn push the policy makers to change the game?

“Good stories can speak directly to the heart. When we make people fall in love with our characters, human or animal, we can take it one tiny step further and give a slight push to channel that love into tangible action. Why wouldn’t you want to use that immense power to drive change. Especially as wildlife filmmakers, when we see the state of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis from the frontlines, it becomes imperative that we do everything that we can to protect what we love,” said Menon.