—Arnav Khanna
Project Tiger marked its 50th anniversary this year and to pay homage to this flagbearer of wildlife conservation, filmmakers Rohit Varma and Kalyan Varma have come out with a feature length documentary titled Project Tiger.

“The world needs to know the project’s story, because it has been a success at not just conserving tigers, but whole habitats,” says Rohit.“We also wanted to dig into the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of the project, and shed light on the price that indigenous communities had to pay to make this project a reality,” he adds.
‘Filming this documentary was a two-year process’
“It took us two years to make this documentary; the research alone took us six months. We interviewed dozens of experts, went through piles of research material and then sifted through the irrelevant bits,” explains Kalyan.
“After this, you need to find the visuals to accompany the source material, which is another long drawn process. Finally, when you’re putting the script together, there is a lot of chopping-and-changing to make sure that every bit is connected,” he says.

‘Today, people like informative films’
“Earlier, documentaries were consumed by a very small niche. Ever since OTT, crime documentaries have rocketed in popularity, so there has definitely been a shift in interest,” says Kalyan. To this, Rohit adds, “People don’t want to be mindlessly entertained, they want to be educated as well, which is where documentaries are gaining popularity.”
‘We waited a long time for the animal shots’
“Global warming has directly impacted our ability to shoot, because now the set patterns and routines that animals used to follow have been disturbed. This one time, we set off to shoot frogs in their mating season, which are monsoons. But due to the rain cycle being delayed that year, we had to wait a whole year to get what we wanted,” tells Rohit.