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.”