Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers wins at Oscars 2023. Know all about director who dedicated award to India

The director of the documentary is a filmmaker and photojournalist based out of Mumbai. Her work focuses on the environment, nature, and wildlife. Recently, in an interview with Hindustan Times, the first-time filmmaker said that her team has come a long way since the beginning of 2017 when they began the movie. Talking about the making of the documentary, Kartiki had said that it happened very organically and there wasn’t a specific moment that made her want to start documenting. “It was a correlation of a lot of years of storytelling and photography,” she had said.

The plot of producer Guneet Monga’s documentary revolves around a family who adopts two orphan baby elephants in Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. Talking about the documentary, Kartiki had told HT, “While most films have focused more on humans being cured by a bond with an animal, humans being harmed by wild animals or wild animals suffering from human expansion into their territory, The Elephant Whisperers lets viewers understand both the elephant and the human carers with minimal, outside interpretation. It portrays the dignity of both the magnificent elephants and the indigenous people who have lived with them and cared for them for centuries.”

Ahead of the Oscar win, Kartiki told Hindustan Times about her first documentary The Elephant Whisperers calling the project an “extremely unusual family dynamic” between a man, a woman, and a young elephant. For Kartiki, the focus of the documentary was to highlight the bond between man and nature.

In her winning speech, Kartiki said, “I stand here today to speak on the sacred bond between us and our natural world. For the respect of indigenous communities. For entity towards other living beings, we share our space with. And finally for co-existence. Thank you to the academy for recognizing our film highlighting indigenous people and animals…To my motherland India.”

The Elephant Whisperers, in its 39-minute runtime, depicts an unbreakable bond between two abandoned elephant calves Raghu and Amu, and their caretakers, Bomman and Belli.