Indian Filmmakers Gain UK Environment Fellowships
Films To Air on Discovery Channel & Wildscreen Festival
Seven Indian wildlife documentary filmmakers have been awarded British Environment Film Fellowships for 2006. The fellowships, worth Rs 600,000 each, have been awarded to Sonya V Kapoor, Himanshu Malhotra, Jay Mazoomdar, Gurmeet Sapal, Kalpana Subramanian, Ashima Narain and Balan for film work towards checking wildlife crimes.
"India is home to thousands of rare flora and fauna including the tiger, the sloth bear and the musk deer among many other endangered species" - Michael Arthur, British High Commissioner
"Wildlife crime is an issue of grave concern for all of us today. India is home to thousands of rare flora and fauna including the tiger, the sloth bear and the musk deer among many other endangered species," British High Commissioner to India Michael Arthur said while announcing the fellowships.
"We all have a role to play in helping to sustain this rich diversity and today, we are offering seven fellowships worth Rs 600,000 each to these enterprising filmmakers to document these challenges. Through this collaborative endeavour between the UK and Indian filmmakers, we hope to address the larger issues of conservation of some of the world's rarest species," he added.
The documentary filmmakers are expected to complete their work by December. The films they make will be aired on Discovery Channel and screened at the Wildscreen Festival, to be held for the first time in India in January 2007
Wildscreen is the world's largest and most prestigious international wildlife and environmental film festival. It is organised every two years in Bristol.
FILM FOCUS
The fellowship films all focus on the problems faced by very diverse species.
Sonya Kapoor's Once There Was a Purple Butterfly looks at the extinction of butterflies across the Indian subcontinent, while Gurmeet Sapal's Killers of the King shows the beauty and the vulnerability of leopards in the hills of Uttaranchal.
Himanshu Malhotra's Vanishing Seas will deal with marine trade. that is not only depleting the seas, but is also endangering the habitat.
The endangered tiger and the forest-dwellers are the focus of Jay Mazoomdar's film The Hunted. The filmmaker will try to show the need to offer hunters a viable alternative livelihood, to steer them away from the hunting and tiger trades.
Kalpana Subramanian's Turtles in a Soup will highlight the turtle poaching and turtle trade in the Gangetic river basin and Kolkata markets, while Ashima Narain's The Last Dance will examine the Indian Sloth bear poaching syndicate operating both within India and across the borders.
Crimes on domesticated and wild elephants in Kerala - will be shown in Balan's The Silenced Witness.