Given the incredible year that S S Rajamouli’s RRR has had, there was, perhaps, very little doubt that it would win the sole category in which it was nominated at the 95th Academy Awards. ‘Naatu Naatu’ by composer M M Keeravani and lyricist Chandrabose was the strongest contender in its category, even considering the other nominees. For India, then, the real surprise was the Oscar won by The Elephant Whisperers, the directorial debut of Ooty-based photographer-turned-filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves. The 41-minute film beat four other contenders to clinch the statuette in the Best Documentary Short Category, making it the first Indian documentary and one of only two Indian productions to win an Oscar (the other one being RRR). “The future is audacious and the future is here,” the film’s producer Guneet Monga tweeted after she had triumphantly held aloft the statuette at LA’s Dolby Theatre.
The Elephant Whisperers follows the story of a young orphaned elephant, Raghu, and his two human “parents”, Bomman and Bellie, in Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. Taking full advantage of the forest’s natural beauty, and shot almost exclusively in natural light, the film’s stunning visuals complement Gonsalves’s gentle, exposition-free storytelling. While the tragedy that undergirds Raghu’s story — his mother was electrocuted when she went looking for food during a prolonged period of drought in the region — is never hidden, Gonsalves retains a tight focus on the love and hope that Bomman and Bellie come to represent in his life. Not surprisingly, the most moving scenes in the film have little dialogue, often featuring Raghu — or, later, his “sister” Ammu — sitting with one of the human caretakers in silent companionship. It’s a heartwarming portrayal of an inter-species bond, a talisman of hope at a time when stories from and about the natural world are — with good reason — far gloomier.
With its Oscar win, could The Elephant Whisperers blaze a trail for other documentary films from India? The global recognition for India’s non-fiction cinema talent has been building up for a few years: Last year, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire, which followed the story of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women, made it to the Documentary Feature nominations. That was followed this year by a nomination in the same category for All That Breathes, Shaunak Sen’s film about two Muslim brothers in Delhi, running a clinic for black kites. The story of the brothers’ love for these magnificent birds is beautifully interwoven with the depiction of a city that is plagued by bad air and an unravelling social fabric. Sen’s film won the prestigious Golden Eye award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival — the same award had been won by Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing the year before. These films, along with others like Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madhesiya, An Insignificant Man by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla and Against The Tide by Sarvnik Kaur, have generated an unprecedented international interest in Indian documentaries. At home, however, the challenge for non-fiction filmmakers — in terms of recognition as well as funds, both government and private — remains huge. The fact that the Films Division, which funded documentary films in India, along with PSBT, has been merged with the National Films Development Corporation (NFDC) is believed by several independent filmmakers to further stack the odds against them.
In this dreary landscape of few resources and almost no recognition at home, the Oscar for The Elephant Whisperers stands as a beacon of hope. When it comes to international awards, few others have the commercial cache that the Academy Awards do. Will it lead to more Indian documentaries getting a commercial release in the domestic market? Perhaps not immediately or to any great extent. But thanks to The Elephant Whisperers’s historic win, the path for other non-fiction filmmakers may just have become a little smoother.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
