Part 7 of 8 · IWN Indian Wildlife Multimedia Series
India’s regional cinema industries have always had a different relationship with landscape than Bollywood. Made closer to the ground, often by filmmakers who grew up in the ecosystems they depict, regional Indian films about wildlife tend to carry a specificity that mainstream Hindi productions struggle to match. The Western Ghats mean something different in a Malayalam film from what they mean in a Mumbaikkar director’s forest adventure. The elephant in a Tamil village drama is not the same creature as the elephant in a Bollywood spectacle. This specificity is the great strength of regional Indian wildlife cinema, and it has produced some of the most honest and most surprising films in the tradition.
Tamil cinema: from folklore to Oscar
Tamil cinema’s relationship with forests and wildlife is woven through its rural drama tradition in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they are so naturalised. Temple elephants, forest-edge farming communities, the economic and emotional relationships between people and the animals that share their landscapes — these are not exotic subjects in Tamil cinema. They are part of the fabric of stories that Tamil directors have been telling for generations.
Kaaval (2015) brought this tradition into contact with contemporary conservation reality, following a forest ranger in Tamil Nadu’s forest protection service and portraying the department as a morally complex institution — neither cleanly heroic nor simply corrupt — in ways that mainstream Tamil action cinema rarely attempts. The film’s forest is a place of competing claims and difficult choices, which is a more accurate portrait of what Tamil Nadu’s protected areas actually look like than most films in the genre manage.
The Elephant Whisperers (2022), directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga, is Tamil-language cinema’s most celebrated encounter with wildlife — and one of the most celebrated in the history of Indian film altogether. Shot in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, the documentary short follows Bomman and Bellie, a Kattunayakan tribal couple assigned to care for Raghu, an orphaned elephant calf. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2023 Oscars — the first Indian production to win in that category. What the film does, and what makes it enduring, is refuse to be a story about conservation in the abstract. It is a story about a specific relationship — between two specific people and one specific animal — that years of patient filming allowed to reveal its own depth.
Malayalam cinema: ecology as social realism
Kerala’s geography has shaped its cinema. A narrow coastal state with the Western Ghats along its eastern edge and one of the highest human population densities in India pressing against forest boundaries that have been shrinking for decades, Kerala has generated a body of wildlife-related filmmaking that is more politically engaged than almost anywhere else in India. The man-animal conflict at Kerala’s forest edges is not an abstract conservation problem in Malayalam cinema. It is a lived reality, and the films that deal with it honestly tend to resist easy conclusions.
Wild Divide, Kadu Kadar Ongal, The Survival, Kaananam — The Spirit of Silent Valley, Arippa, and Punarjeevanam are among the Malayalam-language nature films that have brought the specific ecology of Kerala’s forests — its elephants, its leopards, its contested buffer zones — to screen with the kind of local knowledge that only comes from being embedded in a place. Kumki, centred on the trained captive elephants used in Kerala’s wildlife management, explores a tradition of mahout knowledge and interspecies relationship that is ancient, skilled, and under growing pressure from changing attitudes toward captive animals. Thathekad Diaries approaches the Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary — first championed by the ornithologist Salim Ali — as a diary of a place across seasons, a form of nature filmmaking that prioritises immersion over narrative arc.
The streaming era and the new independent wave
The streaming era has created space for a kind of Indian independent production that was not previously possible. Freed from the commercial imperatives of theatrical release and able to reach national and international audiences through a single platform, filmmakers have begun to engage with wildlife subjects at a level of ambition and complexity that the theatrical market would not have supported.
Sherni (2021), directed by Amit Masurkar and starring Vidya Balan, is the most fully realised Hindi-language fiction film in this wave. Balan plays a forest officer in Madhya Pradesh navigating the competing pressures — from local politicians, from senior officials, from farming communities around the reserve, from hunting interests — that converge around a tigress that has begun killing livestock and eventually people. The film is not, in the end, about the tiger. It is about the systems that determine whether the tiger lives or dies, and about a woman trying to act with integrity inside those systems. It was released on Amazon Prime Video to critical acclaim.
Aranyak (2021, Netflix), set in Himachal Pradesh, wove a folkloric creature — the nar tendua, a half-man, half-leopard of local legend — into a crime narrative that used its forest setting to explore the real tension between tourism, conservation, and the communities that live adjacent to protected areas. And Poacher (2024, Amazon Prime Video), Richie Mehta’s gripping Malayalam-language series based on the true story of one of India’s largest ivory poaching investigations — the Kerala Forest Department’s Operation Shikar, which uncovered a transnational syndicate in 2015 — treated the work of forest officers with a specificity and respect that was, for an Indian production dealing with wildlife crime, unprecedented. Shot across Kerala and Delhi, and attentive to the economic desperation that drives many low-level poachers as much as to the investigators who pursue them, it is the most sophisticated treatment of wildlife crime in Indian screen history.
The gaps: Kannada, Marathi, and what remains
Any survey of regional Indian wildlife cinema must acknowledge what it has not covered. Kannada cinema, rooted in the landscapes of Karnataka — a state with significant tiger, elephant, and leopard populations and some of India’s most contested forest edges — has produced wildlife-adjacent rural drama that sits largely outside the mainstream critical record. Marathi cinema, likewise: the killing of tigress Avni in Yavatmal in 2018 generated substantial public debate, and the documentary and short-film response to that case in Maharashtra has not received the attention it deserves. Both traditions are, in the context of this series, gaps that a future piece might address. Readers with knowledge of films in either language are warmly encouraged to write in.
Next in this series: Part 8 concludes with Indian wildlife animation — from the Doordarshan-era Jungle Book to contemporary OTT productions and the ancient fable tradition that underlies them all.
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: Wikipedia — The Elephant Whisperers · Wikipedia — Poacher · Wildlife Trust of India — Operation Shikar · Wikipedia — Sherni · Wikipedia — Aranyak · Wikipedia — Kaaval · Wikipedia — Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary
Pooja Parvati is the author of IWN’s Jungle Stories series, covering Indian wildlife in cinema, literature, and the arts.