Guneet Monga on ‘The Elephant Whisperers’: It has put an indigenous community on the map

Guneet, whose documentary The Elephant Whisperers is shortlisted at the Oscars, on how it has brought attention to south India’s Kattunayakan community

Producer Guneet Monga is no stranger to the Oscars. In 2019, Period. End of Sentence, on which she served as an executive producer, bagged the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Four years on, her documentary The Elephant Whisperers has been shortlisted for the 95th Academy Awards. The shortlist comes as a huge validation to the producer, who says she has been nothing but “a dreamer”. She begins, “I come from nowhere. Also, producers in India are like financiers. So, it has been about discovering one story at a time, and backing it. The Oscar is the biggest film award in the world. If The Elephant Whisperers gets nominated, I will officially be an Academy-nominated producer. To win the Oscar will be surreal.”

Director Kartiki Gonsalves’s short documentary film tells the heart-warming story of a couple, from the Kattunayakan community in south India, who take care of an orphaned elephant calf, Raghu. Monga says the subject of the Netflix offering spoke to her. “When the story came to me, I was blown away by the thought. Who doesn’t love baby elephants? When you make [such a] documentary, you have to understand the jungle, and the family. It took us three years to make it. I am grateful for this opportunity, because it has put an indigenous community on the map.” Happy to observe that the taste of Indian audiences has evolved in the past few years, the producer adds, “[Now], documentaries are being celebrated in India.”

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