The first Indian film director to win an Academy Award, Kartiki Gonsalves discusses the importance of positive stories.
Kartiki Gonsalves admits she’d never seen the Academy Awards before she won the 2023 Best Documentary Short Film for her work, The Elephant Whisperers. The fresh-faced first-time director is the only Indian film director to have ever won an Oscar, and she hopes to use the accolades to highlight other important stories through her films.
Growing up in Ooty, a quiet hilltop town in southern India, Gonsalves didn’t have access to a television for much of her childhood. Instead, she spent her time camping and exploring the outdoors. “My parents encouraged us to go out into the wilderness and play in the streams, ride horses and read books,” says Gonsalves.
Years later, when the photographer-turned-director came to tell the story of an Indian couple, Bomman and Bellie, and the baby elephants they foster, the norms of documentary filmmaking weren’t exactly front of mind. “I didn’t really grow up in the cinema world at all,” says Gonsalves. “I’d never made anything before, and I didn’t have a good sense of what people have done. So, it’s not like I went back to a pattern or something that I knew in my head.”
With 450 hours of footage shot over six years, Gonsalves planned to make a full-length documentary about the extraordinary relationships between the humans and elephants. But when Netflix came on board halfway through production, the only slot they offered her was a 40-minute film. “I narrowed it down by saying, ‘For me, the special part is this beautiful family bond between Bomman, Bellie and [the baby elephants] Bommi and Raghu,’” says Gonsalves. “Everything else was taken out of it and we were left with a really strong story.”
In 2018, Gonsalves founded an organisation called Earth Spectrum, which is part media-production company, part networking platform for like-minded story-tellers. Earth Spectrum aims to tell and distribute films and tv series that hope to bring about change, whether that’s in conservation outcomes or highlighting the experiences of women, children and other marginalised groups. Through the organisation, Gonsalves hopes to act as executive producer on some of these projects, and to help in other ways.
Released on Netflix globally in 2022, The Elephant Whisperers generated a lot of positive change in India, says Gonsalves. It inspired fundraisers hosted by Indian fashion designer Anita Dongre in support of wild elephant conservation. Almost 100 elephant caregivers in India, including Bomman and Bellie, were given new houses and facilities by the Indian government, and a new 80,000-hectare elephant sanctuary was declared near the Indian city of Trichy (Tiruchirappalli).
For Gonsalves, some of the most important principles in spreading a conservation message is to explore human emotions through storytelling and to focus on the positive, as difficult as that can often be. “We’re living in a world where there’s so much destruction and things that are upsetting everybody – the world is burning,” she says. “People need hope. They don’t always want to get online and watch something that’s sad. If The Elephant Whisperers was a depressing 40 minutes, I don’t think people would have sat through it. There are so many beautiful things that happen in my country that I want the world to see.”
Gonsalves says the emotional element of the story, and the human connection, has made The Elephant Whisperers so popular around the world. She points to a particularly gut-wrenching scene in the film, when baby elephant Raghu is taken against the will of Bomman and Bellie, which reminded some viewers of times when their own children have left home. “I think emotions are the key, to be very honest,” says Gonsalves. “I think that if you have a way to someone’s heart, and it touches them, you’re halfway done.”
Gonsalves knows well the power of images. Her wildlife photography aims to capture the beauty of rare and vulnerable species around the world, such as orcas, puffins and flamingos. She’s interested in exploring how to tell stories without using words, highlighting other recent award-winning wildlife documentaries, such as Haulout, which uses very little language to tell the story of Russian scientist Maxim Chakilev and a population of walruses in the Arctic, and Nuisance Bear, a flm that follows a polar bear migrating across a Canadian town and eschews narration, dialogue and soundtracks. “It shows how powerful visuals can really be,” says Gonsalves. “Even if you take away all of the language from The Elephant Whisperers, you still have a fully fledged film that you can understand.”
Gonsalves is now working on projects to highlight the experiences of women on the Pakistan-India border, and efforts to protect a rare wild cat species in southern India. Her main focus is a new feature-length documentary about the profound spiritual relationship between First Nations people in the Canadian Pacific Northwest and orcas – a species Gonsalves has loved for as long as she can remember. “This is going to be the biggest passion-project of my life.”
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Story by Ken Eastwood