Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers uses a tender family dynamic to explore climate change, shrinking animal habitats and our warped perception of the wild
In a scene from the Oscar-winning best short documentary The Elephant Whisperers, Bellie instructs a young elephant calf to lie down in front of her. “I’ll beat you if you lie down on me,” she says. As if telepathically connected, Raghu responds by gently folding into a heap and quietly placing his head in her lap. It is a miraculous moment that illustrates an astonishingly deep and unlikely maternal bond between a young elephant and his human caregiver. Raghu is at the heart of this documentary directed by Kartiki Gonsalves that uses a tender family dynamic in the middle of an Indian forest reserve to comment on climate change, shrinking animal habitats and our warped perception of the wild.
“I just found it beautiful that this little family had this unusual bond, especially in a time when we are struggling to coexist,” Gonsalves says over a call from the US. In 2017, while driving back from Bengaluru to her hometown Ooty, a hill station in the Western Ghats of southern India, Gonsalves saw a caregiver giving a young calf called Raghu a bath. That’s when it all began. She did not, however, begin shooting in earnest until she had earned the trust of both Bomman and Bellie, the middle-aged couple looking after young calves on the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve.
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