Part 5 of 8 · IWN Indian Wildlife Multimedia Series
Northeast India is one of the world’s great biodiversity frontiers. The eight states — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, and Sikkim — lie at the meeting point of the Indian, Indo-Malayan, and Indo-Chinese biogeographic zones, which means their forests shelter species found in none of these zones alone. The pygmy hog, found only in Assam. India’s only ape, the western hoolock gibbon — listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List — and the eastern hoolock gibbon, listed as Vulnerable. The Bugun liocichla, a bird so recently described by science that it has been seen by barely a handful of ornithologists. The black-necked crane, considered sacred by the Monpa people of Arunachal Pradesh. For decades, this extraordinary ecological territory was dramatically under-represented in Indian wildlife film. The change, when it came, arrived from an unexpected direction.
Cameras as community tools
In 2014, wildlife filmmaker Rita Banerji launched the Green Hub in Tezpur, Assam — a fellowship programme run as a collaboration between her production house Dusty Foot Productions and the North East Network, a women’s rights organisation based in Guwahati. The premise was straightforward and, in the context of Indian wildlife filmmaking, radical: give cameras and training to young people from the communities that actually live alongside the wildlife being filmed, and let them make the films.
Each annual cohort of twenty fellows is drawn from across all eight northeastern states, with seats reserved specifically for women and for applicants from remote tribal areas with no prior access to filmmaking technology. The year-long fellowship trains them in camera work, editing, and storytelling, then sends them into their own landscapes for a ten-month internship. The films they produce are in their own languages — the programme has generated work in 22 local languages and dialects — and they document subjects that outside filmmakers would never have found: the conservation effort of a community group around the Chhoskhorrong Kho river in West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh; the fish-farming traditions of Meghalaya; the fading facial tattoo customs of the Ollo tribe of Nagaland’s Tirap district, and what their loss says about the relationship between cultural identity and land.
The films have been screened at the Bali International Indigenous Film Festival, the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, and India’s All Living Things Environmental Film Festival. In 2025, alumna Salma Sultana Barbhuiya won second place in the Yale Environment 360 Film Contest for Chasing Birds — a documentary about Rustom Basumatary, a former poacher from Assam’s Manas National Park who found identity and purpose in the forest’s birdlife, eventually becoming one of the park’s most sought-after guides. The Green Hub has, in little over a decade, produced the most geographically and linguistically diverse body of wildlife filmmaking ever made in northeast India — and done it entirely from within the communities it documents.
What the films found
Rangjalu Basumatary’s work in Assam’s Baksa district has followed the critically endangered Bengal florican — a grassland bustard that has lost most of its habitat to agriculture and encroachment — combining filmmaking with practical conservation, working with local farmers to adopt practices that protect nesting sites during the breeding season. Gaurab Talukdar’s Raimona: The Paradise Unexplored was the first film shot in the newly declared Raimona National Park in the Bodoland Territorial Council — a park established in 2021, home to over 150 butterfly species, Bengal tigers, clouded leopards, and gaurs.
Shaleena Phinya of Arunachal Pradesh made her fellowship film about the Bugun liocichla, a bird named after her own community. She had not known the bird existed before joining the Green Hub. When the film screened at the Bali International Indigenous Film Festival, it reached audiences that would never otherwise have encountered either the species or the Bugun people who share its forest.
The Habitats Trust partnered with Dusty Foot Productions to support a series of 50 documentary shorts by Green Hub alumni — collectively titled Stories from the Ground: Northeast India — filmed in 22 local languages, that you can watch on their website. The diversity and depth inspire respect. Among the filmmakers: Wanmei Konyak, a former Naga hunter, documenting community-driven eco-restoration; Thangsoi M Khiamniungan’s work recording biodiversity, honey bees, and hoolock gibbons; Thejavikho Chase of Nagaland documenting conservation success stories; Mizoram-based birder Lalvohbika’s work to reduce hunting and document rare species; Millo Tako of Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh and Mordecai Panmei of Azuram, Manipur documenting wild landscapes and community-led conservation.
Tallo Anthony, one of the programme’s most celebrated alumni, has given talks at the Nature inFocus festival in Bengaluru, won awards at tourism film festivals, and co-founded the collective Genesis4northeast with three other Green Hub graduates — one each from Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, and Meghalaya. That last fact is, in its own way, as significant as any film: young people from states that have historically sat on different sides of difficult boundaries choosing to build something together across them.
Rita Banerji and the harder questions
Rita Banerji’s own documentary work in the northeast predates the Green Hub and takes a harder-edged approach to the region’s conservation complexity. Her films, produced through Dusty Foot Productions over decades of fieldwork, have examined the wild meat trade across Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Assam — the uncomfortable intersection of traditional hunting practice, commercial market dynamics, and wildlife population pressure — with the sustained engagement that no short-term production could achieve.
The northeast, she has argued, is a place where forests are primarily community-owned, particularly in the hill states, and where conservation policy has consistently failed to understand the indigenous governance systems that have managed those forests for generations. Her films are an attempt to make that argument visible, and to hold it in tension with the genuine conservation challenges that community governance, in some cases, has been unable to resolve.
Next in this series: Part 6 covers east India’s coastline, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the wildlife of India’s eastern and island territories — some of the most ecologically significant and cinematically under-served landscapes in the country.
This article does not claim to be exhaustive. It attempts to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining editorial rigour. We welcome reader inputs — titles, filmmakers, corrections — to strengthen this record. Write to us at indiawildlifenews.com/contact-us/
Sources: Green Hub / Dusty Foot Foundation · Dusty Foot Productions · The Habitats Trust · Yale Environment 360 · Ashoka Fellows — Rita Banerji · Mongabay India
Pooja Parvati is the author of IWN’s Jungle Stories series, covering Indian wildlife in cinema, literature, and the arts.