Indian entry wins Sundance 2024 documentary competition: Nocturnes spotlights Eastern Himalayan biodiversity

Indian documentary Nocturnes' commitment to a timeline without end feels like deep romance, especially in a world that thinks it needs everything faster and wants nothing forever.

We hear them before we see them—a faint but persistent rustling in the darkness, which turns out to be the fluttering of a million little wings.

And when we first see the moths, they seem tiny, insignificant. Why, we wonder, would two human beings spend so much time and effort on them? A few moments later, though, we see the two researchers again. This time, walking along a forest path, dwarfed almost entirely by the dark green tree canopy that takes up most of the frame, it is the humans who seem insignificant, just a speck on the surface of the earth.

Of such glorious visual revelations is Nocturnes made. Directed by long-time Delhi-based non-fiction filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, the 2024 documentary which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA, earlier this week was shot on location in the misty mountainous forests of Arunachal Pradesh.

Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan.

This is not Dutta and Srinivasan’s first work in the Northeast: their previous collaboration, Flickering Lights, which won the top prize for cinematography at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2023, was about electrification—or the lack of it—in a village in Manipur.

Nocturnes, unlike FL, approaches science not through pragmatics or politics but as a source of wonder. We follow Mansi Mungee, an Indian entomologist in her 30s, as she traverses the forests of the Eastern Himalayas in search of the hawk moth. She is accompanied by Gendan “Bicki” Marphew, a young man from the local Bugun community who works part-time as her photographer-assistant. Sometimes other collaborators appear, too, but the point of view remains very much Mansi’s. As she and Bicki scout locations, we learn about the practicalities she must keep in mind: the specific elevation or height above sea level; the presence of old-growth trees; the existence of a forest clearing to enable light from the moth screen to travel some distance—but also some natural limits to that clearing, so that the moths that show up can be assumed to have come from a single elevation.

Sukanta Majumdar’s impeccable location sound brings the forest to life, overlaid by Nainita Desai’s almost eerie musical compositions complementing our sense of visual discovery. But the work of science is not glamorous, and Yael Bitton’s editing stays close to the precision and slowness and often repetitive labour of recording, measuring, comparing, evaluating. We get a real sense of the long hours spent waiting, with little control over the outcome. Night upon night, the researcher and her assistant are awake into the wee hours, their headlamps and hoods abuzz with winged visitors—hoping that their little island of light will attract at least some of the creatures that they are here to study. But there are no guarantees, and in these moments, scientific work begins to echo the practice of faith.

At one point, when Mansi sketches out the route along which she intends to map the population of hawk moths, and explains to her assistants that they need to take 200 photographs at each point on it, one of them stops her. “How long will this take?” he asks. Mansi’s reply is immediate: “However long. Four months, five months, two years—whatever it takes, we’ll do it.” That commitment to a timeline without end feels like deep romance, especially in a world that thinks it needs everything faster and wants nothing forever.

Several recent Indian documentaries have gained worldwide attention by training their lenses on the subcontinent’s infinitely various natural world and the relationships we have with some particular aspect of it. Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers (2022) won an Academy Award for its portrait of the man-animal bond through one couple and an elephant in the Theppakadu Elephant Camp at Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Rahul Jain’s Invisible Demons (2022) mapped the apocalyptic state of Delhi’s polluted air, while Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) achieved a brilliant mix of the poetic and political with its mordant portrait of two Delhi-based brothers who run a hospital for injured kites. Nocturnes is a quieter, smaller film than the latter two, the filmmakers having chosen a milieu with less scope for ecological handwringing or socio-political critique. But neither does it resort to crowd-pleasing appeals of the orphaned baby elephant variety. It just nudges us to slow down and look—at gossamer spider webs trembling in the weak morning light, a caterpillar looping itself along the strength of a slender branch, the mist unfurling over a dark forested valley, and most often, at its mysterious world of whirring creatures that sometimes live only a few days, but whose ancestors have been on the planet since before the dinosaurs. Like its researcher protagonist, it hides a deep existential investment in its subject under an implacable workaday front.

The film’s least successful moments, for me, are those when it's almost meditative focus on time and labour and the eternal ‘show’ of nature is punctured by overt moments of ‘tell’: Mansi verbalising her enchantment with the species she studies, or asking existential questions to which science may not have any answers: “Why are moths so variegated in colour and pattern? Why do they thrive in these remote forests?” It would also have been interesting to see a little more of the indigenous Bugun and Shertukpen communities, who are thanked in the credits as “the guardians of this forest”. But that would have been a different film, and for now, this one is quite enough.