A wild harmony: Nilgiris documentary captures nature's quiet resilience
The film camera can be a magical thing. The Sony RED delivers unforgettable visual callisthenics, capturing the shifting moods of the Nilgiris with stunning clarity. The cinematography—by Kadur, Nakul Raj, Robin Conz, Sameer Jain and Parinith Gowda—effortlessly traverses gorges and waterfalls, clouds, and mist, and the drama of animals in their natural habitat. Yet, what matches its visual grandeur is the quiet message the film unspools: modern wildlife, and the wildlife of our futures, is not hidden or distant. We co-exist with it.
Among the standout moments: a Salea lizard, found only in the Nilgiris, weaving through garden undergrowth in a private Ooty bungalow; a tiger resting atop a hill, human habitation twinkling below.
Moments like these took several months to capture, Kadur says. Shot over three years and edited from 400 hours of footage—from CCTV, trap cams, and handheld cameras—the film is relentless and patient in its observation of the often-overlooked dramas in the blue mountains.
Rohini Nilekani, chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and executive producer, calls it one of her passion projects. She joined the crew on a few shooting trips herself. The highlight for her: 'It was magical to watch the cubs play out in the open, surrounded by tea, so trusting of the humans around them. I was in awe," Nilekani says, recalling the sight of a mother leopard and her four cubs—two of them melanistic black leopards.
For Kadur, who has previously directed a documentary on the Western Ghats, the shoot had its own serendipitous moments. One of the most powerful scenes features a Great Hornbill chick struggling out of its nest and emerging into the world for the first time.
Nilekani and her family bought a second home in the Nilgiris 20 years ago. Realising that there was no substantial documentation of the region's human-wildlife co-existence, she, her husband Nandan Nilekani, and Kadur—a long-time friend—decided to begin work on the film.
'Maybe with so much wildlife now outside protected areas, we need to create a new culture of protection. For that, we have to understand how beautiful and critical our biodiversity is, we have to fall in love with it. Human thriving is dependent on the enhancement of our forests, our flora and our fauna. Our water, future medicines, and future technologies are hidden in our natural heritage, waiting to be discovered," Nilekani says.
'Where else in the world can you have black leopards, gaur, sloth bear, living in a tea garden? Although it's in a constant state of change, it also shows nature's resilience; adaptability to survive the odds if we allow them the space to do so," Kadur says, about their shared worldview.
The environment and climate are among the largest focus areas in the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies portfolio, with the organisation supporting several institutions across India—including in the Nilgiris. 'This is my first time as an executive producer. I really enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot. I hope young children, who are the future trustees of our biodiversity, will watch this film," says Nilekani.
Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness is currently screening in select theatres in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Ooty, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Kochi and other cities. Student tickets are available at a discount.
Most nature documentaries in recent decades have focused on the damage caused by human expansion and the looming extinction of wild species. This film offers something different: a story of hope, fragility, and interconnectedness. In the Nilgiris, wildlife spills beyond forests into tea gardens and private homes. Leopards and gaur are seen cohabiting with humans. While global wildlife numbers are in decline, the Nilgiris present what Kadur calls a 'reverse story."
In scope, sentiment, and execution, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness is a magnificent outlier—one to be savoured on the big screen. The documentary released in theatres on Friday.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based journalist.
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The Hindu
5 days ago
- The Hindu
Sandesh Kadur's Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness hits the big screen
Sandesh Kadur knew from the start precisely what he wanted his feature documentary, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, to achieve: strike awe in the hearts of his audience. 'Awe is what creates love,' believes the Bengaluru-based award-winning filmmaker and the founder of the film production company Felis Creations. Stirring this emotion could lead to action.'Documentaries have gone a long way in changing people's perception of the world they live in,' he explains. 'The ultimate goal was to be able to have an impact.' Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, which had its theatrical release on July 18, fulfils this vision, offering spellbinding glimpses of the lush Nilgiris landscape and its wildlife, a nod to the stunning biodiversity of this region. Wide shots of megafauna, such as tigers, elephants, and gaur, jostle with close-ups and macro shots of smaller, yet equally entrancing creatures ― a basking Nilgiris salea, endemic to this region, a dragonfly shaking out its gossamer wings after moulting, a vibrant Malabar gliding frog with tangerine webbing between its green fingers and toes, all an intrinsic part of these blue-tinged, ancient mountains. The film, peppered with shots of indigenous people, primordial cave art as well as security camera footage of animals navigating human-built infrastructure, also offers a deep dive into the complex, colonial legacy of modern human settlement in the Niligiris. These scenes and sequences collectively emphasise this fact — the region does not belong solely to nature. 'We consciously wanted to show that whatever wilderness there is, has to be shared; it can't be just for wildlife or just for humans.' The film showed culture through the same lens as nature, says Sandesh, because 'we are a part of nature and need to understand how to live together.' Since its formal launch on November 4, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness has garnered accolades at some of the world's most prestigious film festivals, including WorldFest in Houston, the Cannes World Film Festival, the Ankara International Wildlife Film Festival, and the Santiago Wild Film Festival.'We've been excited by the festival results,' admits Sandesh, pointing out that festival runs are especially useful because they get you an international screening. 'That's the good part, because we want more people from different cultures to watch it.' Sandesh is also chuffed that the film has finally made it to the big screen, receiving an 'overwhelming' response. 'It is hard getting space and respect for a wildlife film in a country flooded by mainstream cinema.' Bringing wildlife stories to the mainstream is incredibly important because it creates new ambassadors, Sandesh says. 'We need to preach beyond the choir, and the only way to do that is to bring it into the theatres where people come from different walks of life.' In love with nature In the corner of the Felis Creations office in Sadashiva Nagar, in Bengaluru, where we meet, is a large framed portrait of Sandesh's late father: the documentary filmmaker and entomologist Dr. BN Vishwanath, who also pioneered urban terrace gardening in the city. 'He was the one who got me into photography,' he says, pointing to the camera, gifted to him by his father when he was 13. 'The camera was 25 years old, and way more experienced than I was,' he smiles. Despite coming from a family of academics, Sandesh did not excel academically. 'In India, you could be a doctor, engineer or disgrace to the family. I was number three,' he quips. So, he was sent away to a college at Brownsville, Texas, where they'd 'accept anybody…to get some diploma.' This college had a research centre at Rancho Del Cielo in Mexico, and it was here that he ended up meeting Professor Lawrence V. Lof, the head of this field station. One day, while talking to Lof, he mentioned that India, too, had a biosphere reserve similar to El Cielo, called the Western Ghats, with cloud forests similar to the one they were working in at the time. 'He was intrigued and said, 'Why don't we work on a documentary?'' recalls Sandesh, who was all of 18 back then. The plan was for him to accompany the Belgian filmmaker John Bax and learn the art of filmmaking from him. 'I was so excited that I told everyone that I'm going to be John Bax's apprentice, and I'm going to India,' he says. Then, one week before they had to leave, John called him and said that he could not travel to India. 'My dream was shattered before it even began,' he says. Lof, however, insisted that he go ahead with the documentary, even paying for the camera and tripod he would need to make the film. 'This community college professor, on his personal credit card, put $10,000 on a no-name nobody and said, 'Okay, go make your documentary'. Who would have that kind of trust?' Sandesh wonders. So, he went ahead and did exactly that, learning how to use his camera and travelling all through the Ghats with it, instead of attending classes, much to his parents' dismay. 'I went back and put it all together, and that's my first documentary, Sahyadris: Mountains Of The Monsoon.' This film, released in 2002 and subsequently winning awards worldwide, was his portal into the world of visual storytelling. 'We got so much press and attention, and Discovery Channel picked up my documentary,' says Sandesh, who has since made numerous other wildlife documentaries, put together several coffee-table books, worked with the BBC and Nat Geo and is a Senior Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers and a National Geographic Explorer. A tryst with the Nilgiris Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness evolved out of a conversation between Sandesh and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani, the film's executive producer, while on a walk in the forests of Coonoor, around three years ago. 'We were having a casual discussion about the Nilgiris, and one of the questions she asked me was if there was any documentary that she could see about it,' remembers Sandesh. He says he thought long and hard about it but could not recall anything except for a few short YouTube videos. 'Even though it was India's first biosphere reserve and has been well-documented in scientific literature, 'there was not a single thing in documentary format.' That was when Rohini, who had fallen in love with the Nilgiris the first time she went there, said they should make an educational documentary, says Sandesh. 'This is entirely funded by Rohini Nilekani philanthropies, an Indian philanthropy,' he says. 'We made an Indian-funded project with an entirely Indian team and worked on it almost entirely in India, which we are all very proud of.' While Sandesh had worked extensively in the Western Ghats before, he says the complexity and uniqueness of the Nilgiris were revealed only when he started working on this project. 'It is a bridge between the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats, a transition zone, with a lot of species on one side and not the other,' he says, pointing out that it is also teeming with endemic species, those unique to a specific geographic region. The team first came up with what Sandesh thinks of as 'hero characters', including those strictly endemic to the region and charismatic big cats like leopards, tigers, and black panthers (melanistic leopards). Once the hero cast was identified, the questions that arose included how to film them in an area spanning three states: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala. 'Initially, we thought our title would be 'Natural Nilgiris', but if you go to the Nilgiris, you will see that there is very little natural that's left there.' Instead, the animals have adapted to what Sandesh calls modern wilderness. 'A 21st-century wilderness that is very different from actual forests,' he explains. 'There is pressure on land, and animals also need to adapt. How they adapt is central to this film.' The team would spend the next two years in the Nilgiris. 'Someone from the crew was always there for the entire time, day in and day out, which is why we could get such unique stories.' All along, Sandesh wanted to create a theatrical experience, and the documentary was filmed keeping that in mind. Not only did the team draw on what they shot, but also from CCTV camera footage, which was 'important, because we wanted to show that we are living in their landscape.' The downside of this approach, of course, was that they ended up with nearly 500 hours of content that had to be whittled down to 75 minutes and then shaped into a cohesive story. 'We write the script on what we film, but we go with the idea that we want to capture behaviour,' he says of the film, which has been narrated by the musician Susheela Raman, who has also worked on the soundtrack with Sam Mills and Neel Adhikari. 'I love Susheela Raman as a musician, composer and voice artist,' he says, explaining that he felt a feminine voice would best suit this mountain ecosystem, where 'I really felt Mother Nature.' Currently, in addition to theatrical screenings, the team is also running an impact campaign, with around 50 private screenings completed so far, many of which have taken place in educational institutions. They are also trying to figure out a way for the film to be released on OTT platforms and translated into local languages, starting with Tamil, to reach a wider audience. 'We have reached around 15,000 people personally, and our team has been engaging with people at a one-on-one level,' says Sandesh, who plans to continue making shorter visual narratives on the Nilgiris on 'some of the issues that we'd like to look into — maybe invasive species, maybe the garbage situation, maybe voices from the Nilgiris,' he says. 'That can help spread the message in a different format.'
Mint
19-07-2025
- Mint
A wild harmony: Nilgiris documentary captures nature's quiet resilience
In an era of digitally manufactured visuals and AI-generated nature scenes, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness stands out as a real, patient, and visually arresting documentary. Directed by Sandesh Kadur and produced by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, it is India's first feature-length wildlife documentary to get a theatrical release—and one that deserves to be seen on the big screen. The film camera can be a magical thing. The Sony RED delivers unforgettable visual callisthenics, capturing the shifting moods of the Nilgiris with stunning clarity. The cinematography—by Kadur, Nakul Raj, Robin Conz, Sameer Jain and Parinith Gowda—effortlessly traverses gorges and waterfalls, clouds, and mist, and the drama of animals in their natural habitat. Yet, what matches its visual grandeur is the quiet message the film unspools: modern wildlife, and the wildlife of our futures, is not hidden or distant. We co-exist with it. Among the standout moments: a Salea lizard, found only in the Nilgiris, weaving through garden undergrowth in a private Ooty bungalow; a tiger resting atop a hill, human habitation twinkling below. Moments like these took several months to capture, Kadur says. Shot over three years and edited from 400 hours of footage—from CCTV, trap cams, and handheld cameras—the film is relentless and patient in its observation of the often-overlooked dramas in the blue mountains. Rohini Nilekani, chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and executive producer, calls it one of her passion projects. She joined the crew on a few shooting trips herself. The highlight for her: 'It was magical to watch the cubs play out in the open, surrounded by tea, so trusting of the humans around them. I was in awe," Nilekani says, recalling the sight of a mother leopard and her four cubs—two of them melanistic black leopards. For Kadur, who has previously directed a documentary on the Western Ghats, the shoot had its own serendipitous moments. One of the most powerful scenes features a Great Hornbill chick struggling out of its nest and emerging into the world for the first time. Nilekani and her family bought a second home in the Nilgiris 20 years ago. Realising that there was no substantial documentation of the region's human-wildlife co-existence, she, her husband Nandan Nilekani, and Kadur—a long-time friend—decided to begin work on the film. 'Maybe with so much wildlife now outside protected areas, we need to create a new culture of protection. For that, we have to understand how beautiful and critical our biodiversity is, we have to fall in love with it. Human thriving is dependent on the enhancement of our forests, our flora and our fauna. Our water, future medicines, and future technologies are hidden in our natural heritage, waiting to be discovered," Nilekani says. 'Where else in the world can you have black leopards, gaur, sloth bear, living in a tea garden? Although it's in a constant state of change, it also shows nature's resilience; adaptability to survive the odds if we allow them the space to do so," Kadur says, about their shared worldview. The environment and climate are among the largest focus areas in the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies portfolio, with the organisation supporting several institutions across India—including in the Nilgiris. 'This is my first time as an executive producer. I really enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot. I hope young children, who are the future trustees of our biodiversity, will watch this film," says Nilekani. Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness is currently screening in select theatres in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Ooty, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Kochi and other cities. Student tickets are available at a discount. Most nature documentaries in recent decades have focused on the damage caused by human expansion and the looming extinction of wild species. This film offers something different: a story of hope, fragility, and interconnectedness. In the Nilgiris, wildlife spills beyond forests into tea gardens and private homes. Leopards and gaur are seen cohabiting with humans. While global wildlife numbers are in decline, the Nilgiris present what Kadur calls a 'reverse story." In scope, sentiment, and execution, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness is a magnificent outlier—one to be savoured on the big screen. The documentary released in theatres on Friday. Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based journalist.
Business Standard
17-07-2025
- Business Standard
'Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness' Wildlife Documentary Film to Release in Theatres Nationwide
PNN Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], July 17: Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, a feature-length wildlife documentary film on India's first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve - the Nilgiris, will be released in theatres across India on July 18, 2025. Presented by Felis Films and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, and distributed nationwide by Dheeraj Films. The Nilgiris is the first feature-length wildlife documentary to receive a nationwide theatrical release. The film has already won multiple international awards and received acclaim for its cinematic excellence and storytelling. Directed by Emmy-nominated and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Sandesh Kadur, the film was shot in 8K resolution using the best of Sony Professional and RED cameras. It is a true cinematic celebration of the region's wildlife and landscapes. Speaking about the film, Rohini Nilekani, Executive Producer of the film and Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, said, "With this film - Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness, we hope to awaken people to the incredible beauty and biodiversity of this ancient and unique biosphere - the largest protected forest area in the country, now undergoing rapid change driven by human activity. If we wish to continue to conserve it, Samaaj, Sarkaarand Bazaar will have to work in unison to nurture this ecosystem. The documentary is a call to action for everyone who feels connected to these sacred landscapes." Sandesh Kadur, Director and Cinematographer of the film, said, "This is the story of a new wilderness, a mostly human-made landscape, where wildlife continues to adapt and thrive. Where else in the world can you have black leopards, gaur, sloth bears, etc., all living in a tea garden? Although it's in a constant state of change, it also shows nature's resilience and adaptability to survive the odds - if only we allow them the space to do so." Trailer: Releasing in: Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Ooty, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Kochi, Trivandrum, Delhi, and other cities across India. As part of a nationwide education initiative, Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness will also be screened through exclusive, discounted student shows across major cities. The initiative aligns with the NEP 2020 vision of encouraging experiential and environmental learning. "I urge school principals, teachers, and parents to bring children to the theatres for this special experience. When young minds witness the beauty of our land--its forests, animals, and landscapes--on the big screen, they are inspired to love, to learn, and to protect. Watching a wildlife film like this in a theatre is rare--and powerful. Unlike small screens, the big screen brings every detail to life. With its high-resolution imagery and immersive sound, it feels as if you're right inside the forest with the animals," says Rohini Nilekani, Executive Producer of Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness. About Felis Creations A Panda Award-winning company, Felis Creations is a Bangalore-based natural history production house founded by Sandesh Kadur, a BAFTA-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer. They specialise in producing high-quality wildlife and conservation documentaries for global platforms including National Geographic, BBC, Netflix, Apple, and Discovery. About Rohini Nilekani Rohini Nilekani is the Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Co-founder and Director of EkStep, a non-profit education platform. She is also the Founder and Former Chairperson of Arghyam, a foundation she set up in 2001 for sustainable water and sanitation, which funds initiatives across India. From 2004 to 2014, she was Founder-Chairperson and chief funder of Pratham Books, a non-profit children's publisher that reached millions of children during her tenure. She sits on the Board of Trustees of ATREE.
