A fresh interest in documentaries signals the dawn of a new era
1 year, 8 months ago

A fresh interest in documentaries signals the dawn of a new era

The Hindu  

Published : Jul 13, 2023 11:00 IST - 14 MINS READ The success of two Indian documentaries at the international level—Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes—is noteworthy because, like fiction films, Indian documentaries have not generally made a mark outside the country. The best-known documentary filmmakers in India would be those like Anand Patwardhan, who has openly declared that he is not into making films as much as expressing dissent and this has been the dominant tendency. Why Indian documentaries chose the activist mode is not a question that can be easily answered but the truisms they try to propagate have parallels in popular cinema’s traditional articulation of puranic truths. A strategy in the Indian activist documentary is the segregation of interviewees into good and bad people and the latter being made to look ridiculous—as are the Hindutva activists in Patwardhan’s War and Peace who distributed earth from around Pokhran, after the nuclear tests of 1998, as sacred prasad; or the head priest of the Kasi Viswanath temple in Stalin’s India Untouched, who justifies caste discrimination based on his reading of the Manusmriti.

Cinema Indian Elephant Era Documentaries Activist Documentary Film Films Division Great Documentary Films India Great Documentary Film Indian Documentaries Popular Cinema  interest  documentaries  fresh  activist  signals  elephant  era  dawn  films  india  great  documentary  film  cinema  indian

History of this topic

Elephant Whispers: A Symphony of Memory and Loss
5 months, 3 weeks ago

Elephant Whispers: A Symphony of Memory and Loss

Times of India  

The article highlights the importance of protecting elephants, both for their ecological and cultural significance. It emphasizes the need for better conservation efforts and the recognition of human-like capacities in elephants. The piece also discusses the impact of human activities on elephant habitats and the need to respect the planet's biodiversity.

Enter the expansive world of Indian cinema
7 months, 1 week ago

Enter the expansive world of Indian cinema

India Today  

Imagine walking into a large hall to discover memorabilia, photographs, posters, booklets, polaroids, paintings, merchandise and diverse physical as well as pictorial depictions representing Indian cinema right from the silent era to contemporary times that denotes the evolution of movies in this country. It is to shed light on the famous, the not-so-known and even the forgotten aspects of Indian …

INTERVIEW | Kartiki Gonsalves: ‘Building a community of documentary filmmakers is crucial’
1 year, 8 months ago

INTERVIEW | Kartiki Gonsalves: ‘Building a community of documentary filmmakers is crucial’

The Hindu  

Published : Jul 13, 2023 11:00 IST - 7 MINS READ A natural history and social documentary photographer-turned-director, Kartiki Gonsalves made a remarkable entry into the film industry with her debut work, The Elephant Whisperers in December 2022. Set in the picturesque Theppakadu Elephant Camp in Tamil Nadu, Gonsalves’ film followed the lives of Bomman and Bellie, and the couple’s …

Editor’s Note: Is the Great Indian Documentary on the cusp of another kind of great?
1 year, 8 months ago

Editor’s Note: Is the Great Indian Documentary on the cusp of another kind of great?

The Hindu  

Published : Jul 13, 2023 11:00 IST - 3 MINS READ Documentary filmmaking is sometimes dated back to Robert Paul’s 1895 film about the Chicago World’s Fair. As the film director Goutam Ghose tells Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay, the works that Films Division produced down the years are a “priceless audiovisual documentation of our history”. Is the Great Indian Documentary on …

Makers of ‘The Elephant Whisperers’, Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga, on their Oscar win and the triumph of Indian non-fiction
2 years ago

Makers of ‘The Elephant Whisperers’, Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga, on their Oscar win and the triumph of Indian non-fiction

The Hindu  

After she was unceremoniously played off at the 95th Academy Awards — where The Elephant Whisperers won Best Documentary Short Film — producer Guneet Monga turned back to the rostrum and yelled out, “This is India’s first film to win an Oscar!” It was a thrilling moment, for obvious reasons, yet entirely of a piece with Guneet, whose tenacity and …

Explained: What makes The Elephant Whisperers worthy of global love, recognition, and of course, the Oscar
2 years ago

Explained: What makes The Elephant Whisperers worthy of global love, recognition, and of course, the Oscar

Firstpost  

Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga’s documentary The Elephant Whisperers made history at the 95th Academy Award for becoming the first film from India to win the Oscar. The Elephant Whisperers follows the bond that develops between an indigenous couple and an orphaned baby elephant, Raghu, who was entrusted to their care. The tribute that followed Given how Guneet Monga and …

Oscar-winning ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ producer Guneet Monga: The future for Indian cinema is audacious, the future is here and the future is truly female
2 years ago

Oscar-winning ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ producer Guneet Monga: The future for Indian cinema is audacious, the future is here and the future is truly female

The Hindu  

Indian documentary The Elephant Whisperers bagged the Best Documentary Short Award at the 95th Academy Awards. Monga calls this win “an incredibly powerful and historical moment”. I’m so proud of this film, this moment and proud of my amazing team at Sikhya Entertainment, that an independent production house from India has made the history to be the first ever Indian …

Oscars 2023: India’s ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ wins Best Documentary Short Award
2 years ago

Oscars 2023: India’s ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ wins Best Documentary Short Award

The Hindu  

Indian documentary The Elephant Whisperers bagged the Best Documentary Short Award on Monday morning at the ongoing 95th Academy Awards. This makes it the first Indian production to win under the category Directed by Kartiki Gonsalves, the Netflix documentary competed alongside four other films in the category: Haulout, How Do You Measure a Year?, The Martha Mitchell Effect and Stranger …

Here's why Netflix's The Elephant Whisperers is one of the most significant stories recognized by the Oscars
2 years, 1 month ago

Here's why Netflix's The Elephant Whisperers is one of the most significant stories recognized by the Oscars

Firstpost  

For years, India, its diversity, beauty and culture has been an intrigue to the West. That was until Netflix India’s ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ directed by Kartiki Gonsalves came into being. This gem of a documentary that made India proud and won itself an Oscar nomination in the ‘Best Documentary Short’ category is probably the most significant Indian stories to have …

Can Oscar-nominated The Elephant Whisperers give a fillip to India’s documentary scene?
2 years, 2 months ago

Can Oscar-nominated The Elephant Whisperers give a fillip to India’s documentary scene?

The Hindu  

Published : Jan 30, 2023 15:46 IST More than five years ago, Kartiki Gonsalves was driving from Ooty, her hometown, to Bengaluru, where she worked. Bomman, his wife Bellie, and their ‘child’ Raghu have hit the headlines globally now, thanks to The Elephant Whisperers, a 41-minute Netflix documentary directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga and Achin Jain …

Festival of films on oppressive regimes and resistance
2 years, 5 months ago

Festival of films on oppressive regimes and resistance

The Hindu  

Bangalore Film Society in collaboration with Pedestrian Pictures, Rushes Film Club of St Joseph’s University and Gamana Women’s Collective is organising ‘Aane Matthu Iruve : Story of a Republic’, a film festival and panel discussions, from October 19 to 21. The event at St. Joseph’s University Auditorium will be inaugurated by Prakash Raj and Harinder Kaur Bindu. “A film festival …

The documentary movement in India
6 years, 11 months ago

The documentary movement in India

The Hindu  

AS far as literature on Indian cinema is concerned, the preferences and prejudices are pronounced: first comes Hindi cinema, which is considered “national cinema”; then comes the preoccupation with full-length feature films, followed by its major auteurs. Only feature films and film-makers are considered worthy of attention; documentary films, film-makers and movements across the country rarely figure in historical and …

Documenting India
8 years, 11 months ago

Documenting India

The Hindu  

A HEARTENING development in recent years is the growing body of literature on the Indian documentary film, depicting its transformational role in society and its place in the history of resistance to state brutality and the struggle against various interests intent on riding roughshod over citizens’ rights to serve corporate greed. Art house cinema emerged as a challenge to this …

Narrating actuality
11 years, 5 months ago

Narrating actuality

The Hindu  

SINCE 2013 has been marked as the centenary year of Indian cinema, it has also been broadly accepted as the 100th year of Indian documentary. Those early moving images, without any cut and paste, were called “actuality films” and later also as “topicals”—direct recordings of real-life happenings, which were exhibited as one film, from camera on to camera off. In …

Discover Related