Caution: spoilers ahead for ‘Sherni. In Amit Masurkar’s third feature Sherni , the debate around wildlife conservation in India gets a hu...
Caution: spoilers ahead for ‘Sherni.
In Amit Masurkar’s third feature Sherni, the debate around wildlife conservation in India gets a human face. It belongs to Vidya Balan, playing principled forest department officer Vidya Vincent who gets involved in a hunt for a man-eating tiger. Surrounded by dedicated colleagues, apathetic bosses and meddling politicians, Vidya finds that her greatest adversary isn’t the big cat named T12 but a blood-thirsty hunter.
The Amazon Prime Video release has been drawing positive responses from conservationists who see echoes of their own battles in Vidya’s struggle to be taken seriously, Masurkar told Scroll.in. The director of Sulemani Keeda and Newton explained Sherni’s powerful opening and closing sequences and the bits in between.
Why the tiger? Why not?
Sherni is based on a story and screenplay by Aastha Tiku. The dialogue is by Masurkar and Yashaswi Mishra. “We chose the tiger because it’s a flagship species of conservation and is India’s national animal,” Masurkar explained. “The tiger is culturally a symbol of many things.”
In the movie, T12 is a spectral presence, managing to evade her hunters until she is tricked out of her lair. A forest guard observes that if you enter the jungle a hundred times, you might spot a tiger once, but the tiger would have seen you 99 times.
All the...
