Part 6 of 8 · IWN Indian Wildlife Multimedia Series
India’s eastern coastline and its island territories are, in documentary terms, some of the most ecologically significant and most overlooked landscapes in the country. From the wetlands of Odisha, where Olive Ridley sea turtles arrive in their hundreds of thousands, to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, where endemic species evolved in isolation over millions of years, these are places that have generated remarkable documentary work while remaining almost entirely outside the mainstream of Indian wildlife filmmaking. The gap between what these places contain and what has been filmed there is one of the more striking absences in the tradition.
Odisha: lakes, turtles, and a conservation success story
Asia’s largest brackish water lake and lagoon, Chilika in Odisha, was considered a dying ecosystem for most of the twentieth century. Silting up, losing its outlets to the sea, declining in fish stocks and bird populations — it was barely recognisable as the place that had once hosted migrating waterfowl from Central Asia, Siberia, and Europe in numbers that astonished observers. Then, through a patient process of scientific management by the Chilika Development Authority, it came back.
Shekar Dattatri shot two films on the lake for the CDA in 2013 — Chilika: Jewel of Odisha (21 minutes) and the companion Managing Chilika (15 minutes) — over 18 months of fieldwork. The films capture Irrawaddy dolphins, wintering birds, and the fishing communities whose livelihoods track the lake’s health almost as accurately as any instrument. Both are on YouTube. They are quiet, methodical works — Dattatri’s characteristic mode — and deeply satisfying in the way that any honest account of something saved from destruction tends to be. Chilika won international recognition at the Sondrio Festival in Italy, where Dattatri spoke about what it took to make an ecosystem film on a lake with, as he put it, no spectacular wildlife and hazy light for much of the year.
The Ridley’s Last Stand, an earlier Dattatri film, turned its attention to the Olive Ridley sea turtle and the commercial trawler industry killing tens of thousands of them each year in Odisha’s coastal waters. The mass nesting phenomenon known as the arribada — in which hundreds of thousands of female turtles come ashore simultaneously — is one of the great wildlife spectacles on earth, and Odisha’s beaches at Gahirmatha and Rushikulya are among its most important global sites. The film contributed to enhanced government scrutiny of trawler operations in the nesting season, with measurable effects on turtle mortality in the years since.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands: the frontier that film has barely touched
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are, in documentary terms, one of the most difficult places on earth to film in. The archipelago of 836 islands in the Bay of Bengal contains dense tropical rainforests, some of the most intact coral reef systems in the Indian Ocean, 270 species of birds with 106 of them found nowhere else in the world, and some of the earth’s last uncontacted indigenous communities. The combination of military sensitivity, restricted area permits, tribal protection laws, and ecological fragility has kept serious documentary filmmakers at bay for decades.
The BBC and Netflix production Land of the Tiger (2023) included a significant sequence on the islands’ marine wildlife — reef fish, sharks, manta rays, the extraordinary biodiversity of the coral systems — as part of its comprehensive sweep across India’s ecosystems. The documentary The Vanishing People of Little Andaman (1998), though focused on the indigenous Onge community rather than wildlife, is a rare filmed record of both the people and the environment of an island that has since become further restricted to outside visitors. The Nicobar Islands: A Monkey’s Long Tale, produced by the Malaysia-based PIK Film, follows an Indian filmmaker’s exploration of the Nicobar archipelago’s endemic wildlife and coastal ecology — one of the very few productions to document these islands in any sustained detail.
The access restrictions that make the Andamans difficult to film in are not arbitrary. They reflect genuine concerns about island ecosystem fragility, indigenous community rights, and the security sensitivities of a strategically located archipelago. But they have created a documentary gap of striking proportions. As India’s development plans for the islands have intensified — drawing increasing scrutiny from conservationists and environmentalists — the need for rigorous, independently produced documentation of the islands’ wildlife has never been greater. That work, for the most part, remains to be done.
The broader east: what is waiting
Beyond Chilika and the islands, large portions of eastern India’s wildlife remain largely undocumented on film. Bhitarkanika, one of India’s most important mangrove ecosystems, home to enormous saltwater crocodile populations and spectacular waterbird rookeries, has received scant attention. A couple of new initiatives include: Anubhab Dutta’s 2026 travel diaries featuring Bhitarkanika, under the platform Wildlife Kaptured; a few episodes titled “Living inside India’s Amazon” in 2025, by Walk in the Wild, India’s first wildlife travel platform; and an older documentary series by NDTV titled Born Wild that featured Bhitarkanika’s mangroves in 2006.
The Mahanadi river system, the forests of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the coastal wetlands of West Bengal beyond the Sundarbans — all of these are waiting. Dattatri’s model of patient, targeted, ecosystem-specific documentary has proven its value in Odisha. What east India needs now is more filmmakers willing to work the same way in the landscapes that have not yet been found.
Next in this series: Part 7 surveys regional and independent cinema from across India — the Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi fiction films that have placed wildlife at their moral centre.
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: Shekar Dattatri · Chilika Development Authority · Sondrio Festival · Land of the Tiger — BBC/Netflix · Wildlife Kaptured · Walk in the Wild
Pooja Parvati is the author of IWN’s Jungle Stories series, covering Indian wildlife in cinema, literature, and the arts.