Wild Tamil Nadu, an hour-long documentary directed by Kalyan Varma, is a love story of sorts, narrated with nuance and put together with deep respect for the creatures filmed. A tribute to Tamil Nadu and its unique landscape as referenced in Sangam literature — Kurunji (the mountains), Mullai (forests), Marutam (crop land and rivers), Neidhal (seashore) and Paalai (desert), it is now playing in select PVR screens.
Kalyan, who earlier co-directed Wild Karnataka, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. What makes Wild Tamil Nadu fascinating is how much you take back from it. Creatures, some big but many small, shine under the spotlight. The documentary is produced by Arathi Krishna of Sundaram Fasteners.
Music by Ricky Kej, which primarily features Indian sounds, lifts the experience, while editor Akhilesh Thambe manages to compress hours of footage into a memorable, even action-packed, 60 minutes. Actor Arvind Swami lends his rich voice for both the Tamil and English versions.
In an interview with TNM, director Kalyan speaks of what went into the making of the documentary, how he likes to showcase wildlife and some of the creative choices exercised.
Below are some edited excerpts:
While the documentary is visually rich, it is also packed with delicate detail. How did you strike a balance there?
The point of a documentary is not just beauty, but to make viewers go back learning something new and also be entertained. In today’s world of Instagram and 30-second reels, watching capacity has shrunk. To keep them engaged, we need a balance of entertaining stories that are also educational. That is one of the reasons why the big animals — elephants and the big cats — get little screen time.
Instead, we consciously focussed on antlions, goby fish, the baya weaver and rock agama. Some of these you can even see in your backyard in a city like Chennai.
Can you speak a little about the decision to segment the documentary into the varied landscapes as described by Sangam literature.
This was something we did halfway through the documentary. From the beginning, we knew there were two ways in which we could showcase this — one was to focus on the many habitats in Tamil Nadu from the Western Ghats to the ocean, desert and farm land; the other was to follow the attitudinal gradient and how water flows — water from the Western Ghats 2,400 m above sea level is trapped, moves to the deciduous forests, then crop land, and you finally have the desert.
The music sets the tone for the visual experience in many ways. How did you decide the soundscape and narration?
I have collaborated with Ricky before and he’s really good at fusing Indian classical with contemporary sounds. This suits wildlife documentaries well, and it was natural to collaborate. Arvind was the choice of our producer Arathi. We felt it would help to have on board a much-recognised actor who speaks well — he was phenomenal in the Tamil version.
Looking back, which is your favourite segment of the documentary?
That would be Paalai or desert. I did not know there were sand dunes in Tamil Nadu (Therikaadu in Thoothukudi district) till we went there. And I found the deserts most interesting. But for it, I might have never seen the Madras hedgehog, which has not been photographed by many.
Did Tamil Nadu reveal itself to you a bit more through the process of making the documentary?
Absolutely. I spent months speaking to people with a stake in the landscape — scholars, scientists, local communities — and hearing their stories. It made the place come alive. This documentary is the result of many such conversations. It enriched the shooting process.
How difficult was the editing process with the treasure trove of footage you had?
We had close to 100 TB of footage — that’s about hundreds of hours, but we had a wonderful editor in Akhilesh Thambe and we edited as we shot. So, we knew what we had and what we needed, especially when we were filming the same animal.
The segment on the primates — both lion-tailed macaques and bonnet macaques stood out for how they are approached with a certain respect…
I love filming primates. For one, they are the closest to us genetically, and you cannot but help associate human emotions with them. We do so with others too, but with primates the link is too obvious — the five digits attached to the palm, the expressions, the quirkiness. I am glad that representation has worked well.
Subha J Rao is an entertainment journalist covering Tamil and Kannada cinema and is based out of Mangaluru, Karnataka.