When the documentary feature My Octopus Teacher won an Oscar in 2020, it drew the world’s attention. It was one of the few visual experiences that, without making noise, urged you to feel the pulse of nature. This film requests that you just watch and listen to it peacefully without imposing your thoughts. It has the capacity to teach you the philosophy of living that has shaped humans since primitive times. Through its visual language, this documentary feature establishes a different kind of dialogue with viewers. Although there have been many visual depictions in cinema before which urge careful observation of nature, the number of such scenes is quite small. In this context, My Octopus Teacher is an excellent example of the human story taking a back seat and the patience to feel nature assuming priority.
If we talk about the environment in cinema, it has always been present in some form or another. Cinema has always used the beauty of nature like a theatrical landscape, just like actors in the background who are present yet not present. Viewers’ attention rarely goes to them.
Nature is present in cinema just to make a scene more beautiful; the viewer does not linger to watch and listen to it, but moves forward with the story of the main character. Until now, cinema has created such ornamental delineation where the story revolves around a human. The practice of stopping to listen to nature in cinematic scenes, if ever done, is only through a character. Nature itself has rarely been portrayed as a character. Alt-hough, there have been some exceptions to this trend that has been ongoing from the past three decades.
Many excellent films have been made on various environmental issues, including Dreams (by Akira Kurosawa, 1990), Fire Down Below (by Felix Enriquez, 1997), A Civil Action (by Steven Zaillian, 1998), Erin Brockovich (by Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and Avatar (by James Cameron, 2009). This list could be longer if documentaries, short films, and television series were included. These films draw attention because of how their narrative are centred on environmental concerns, and also try to directly put corporations responsible for environmental exploitation in the dock. The 2009 film Avatar quite excellently portrays the corporate greed that has evicted indigenous peoples and wildlife from forests, seized water, forests and land and destroyed them, represented as an attempt to capture a utopian planet.
Similarly, for the past two decades, many documentaries, short films, television series and major films have been made on environmental issues, and collectively they have tried to include the subjects in mainstream cinema discourse. The television series Chernobyl (2019) can be specifically mentioned here. But on the other hand, the number of films made about climate change, the adverse effects of nuclear power, excessive exploitation of nature and its pollution is less than the number of films that somehow indirectly justify the war waged against nature.
As viewers, there is a need to be especially careful when watching such films. If observed carefully, in the last few decades, corporations have tried to shape the world differently through cinema; they have filled the world with action films, superhero films and films about potential threats to humanity from aliens or terrifying disasters. Think of the series on dinosaurs, anacondas, sharks, whales, chimpanzees and the “Hulk”. The fact is, cinema has portrayed the environment as a villain through its visual language for many years. Often, the hero of these films sets out on a victory campaign against this “villain” created in the form of nature, destroying everything. Through such films, cinema creates an atmosphere of fear against wildlife so that the path for their suppression can be cleared.
The real villain, however, is the commercial greed that has put the life of the entire Earth in danger; but commercial cinema essentially shows everyone else as the villain except this. Now if you think about the scenes of these action and superhero films, the way nature is being destroyed in each scene, remember how the viewers sitting in the audience clap, while getting habituated to such scenes through visual language. This results in humans’ silence on the exploitation of forests, mountains, and rivers, and they do not protest the way every responsible citizen should. Cinema does not just convey entertainment, it also conveys ideas, and conditions the human brain. But for some time, some films and movements have also tried to break this conditioning.
It is no coincidence that the past decade has been quite tumultuous in terms of environmental discourse, and while for several years climate change has not been in focus, it has become today’s reality and its effect is being felt around the world. Indian cinema is not immune from this reality. In 2021, two notable Indian films were released, Sherni in Hindi and Boomika in Tamil, although both were of different styles. Before them, films like Pani (2008), Jal (2013), Irada (2017), Kadvi Hawa (2017) also highlighted environmental issues. But these films of 2021 wove narratives of women and nature. The voice of ecofeminism can be heard in them. Although Boomika has been crafted in the style of a horror film and has its weaknesses, the way it crafts a story of exploitation of nature through the eyes of women, and asks the viewer to see women and nature as one, places it in the ecofeminist category of films.
However, being made in the horror genre, this film became more irrational in places. Nevertheless, the making of films on this subject in Indian cinema is a sign of an excellent beginning.
Then there is Amit V Masurkar’s film Sherni, which quietly unmasks the collusion of environmental degradation and patriarchy through cinema’s visual language without being too loud, trans-forming this film into an excellent visual experience.
In this film, Amit presents both the woman and the tigress as metaphors for each other, making their way in the jungle of patriarchy. This film beautifully depicts the ecofeminist ideology. Forest officer Vidya Vincent, in the end, saves the next generation of wildlife in the form of the tigress’s cubs from the hands of patriarchy. However, the canvas of this film is even larger; it very minutely raises many issues at the same time, from environmental concerns to local partisan poli-tics, gender discrimination in the workplace, illegal mining, the problem of employment in rural society, hunting of wild-life, endangering the ecosystem for profit, corporate-friendly politicians and their insensitivity, and lack of education on environmental issues. This film also tries to define the sensitive relationship between women and nature in a new way, and it does not just present the problem but also awakens hope in the new generation, in the form of forest friends. This film makes one hope that even if the current generation does not understand, the coming generation will definitely under-stand and build a relationship of coexistence between nature and humans. Anyway, it is pleasing to see such serious-ness on environmental issues in Hindi cinema.
(Neera Jalchhatri is an educator, filmmaker and writer based in Delhi)
This series explores the most pressing environmental issues through the prism of literature
This article was originally published in the May 16-31, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth