‘Nocturnes’ just concluded its play at Metrograph in New York. It is currently playing at Royal in Los Angeles. It starts screening at Roxie Theater in San Francisco on Nov. 8.
Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta are always chasing the light. In last year’s film, “Flickering Lights,” they traveled to the Indo-Myanmar border to witness the arrival of electricity in the village of Torah. In 2024, their film “Nocturnes” premiered at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft.
“Nocturnes” is not easily described. It’s a film about hawk moths in the eastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh. It’s about Mansi Mungee, a quantitative ecologist who studies these moths, and how minute changes in temperature are making them move to higher elevations. In this journey, she is joined by Bicki, whose knowledge of his land helps the research. Ultimately, it’s about friendships between Mansi and Bicki, nature and us, and us and the strangers we watch the film in darkness with. It is a call to forge connections, a plea to look away from our screens and immerse ourselves in the sights and sounds of a documentary in a way that’s rare.
Ahead of its release in art house theaters across the country, I caught up with the filmmakers, who made the film braving the unforgiving weather in the Indian northeast, including leeches raining on them in the middle of a severe storm. Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You both live in Delhi, which is very different from the forests of Arunachal Pradesh. What made you want to make this film?
“It was the combination of our urge to connect to nature, plus this cinematic vision that Mansi painted for us.”
Anupama Srinivasan: Living in Delhi was one of the reasons that motivated us, because we are just cooped up in the house with the AC or the heater on. We can barely breathe there. We were making a film in the western Himalayas on snow leopards. There, we met Mansi. She described her work in the eastern Himalayas and was like, “Oh, my real passion is moths. We put up this white screen at dusk, and wait for moths. They come in hoards and fill up the screen. And they’re so beautiful.” We were like, “Oh my God, this is like a film unfolding, and we gotta see this.” It was the combination of our urge to connect to nature, plus this cinematic vision that Mansi painted for us.
The film is so visual that it’s hard to imagine this film if you’ve never seen the moths on the screen. How did you envision this?
Anirban Dutta: I have two kids whose worlds are becoming very limited to their cellphone and laptop. I wanted to offer them an invitation to go back to nature. There was so much entropy and dystopia in the world, we wanted to make something peaceful.
Did you know anything about moths?
AS: Not much at all. In fact, when Mansi told us that they were beautiful, we were like, “Oh, really?” I remember the first time we filmed, Mansi and her team finished their work and went away. We stayed back all night and filmed every moth. It was sort of love at first sight.
The Indian northeast is a politically contentious area, and most documentaries will either focus on the conflicts or take a more anthropological tone. How did you decide on your tone?
AD: As documentary filmmakers, we are very conscious of the gaze with which films are made and the exoticization of the northeast by mainland Indian filmmakers. Our engagement with the northeast started in 2005, and we spent 10 years there before we picked up the camera. It was a very slow process of trying to find that bridge for dialogue and not to look at people from the northeast as exotic indigenous people. We needed to acknowledge that this land — where we go and film in, where this research is happening, all of this — has been protected by the indigenous community, the Bugun and the Sherdukpen community.
What was your process of collaboration like?
AD: It was a continuous dialogue. Every time we would go for a shoot, we would stop at the village and meet the village head and the elders and ask for their permission. Similarly, the scientists were very much a part of the process. We were observing what they were doing, and when we were transferring the footage, they’d often sit with us and watch the footage.
It’s also a film about friendship. Mansi and Bicki are friends, and they wouldn’t have known each other had it not been for moths. When did you see that develop as a plot point?
AS: We only knew Mansi and her mentor, Ramana Athreya. They set up the moth screen, and Bicki was there in the background. But as we observed the work more and more, we realized that it’s so dependent on Bicki and the other people, because they know the terrain, the weather … they know when the wild animals might or might not come. We also liked the way Mansi was interacting with Bicki. In a documentary, it’s always a process where you find what you want to focus on and what you want to leave out. We left out the logistical part of their lives and went to the core of how they were interacting with each other, keeping only bits of conversation. We also gave just enough information about moths, which would help them navigate the film.
This is a very minimalist film, almost a silent film when it comes to dialogues but built with natural sounds. Why did you pare it down so much?
AD: In Indian classical music, there is a structure of a raga with only a few notes. But a classical musician expands and contracts it over a period of hours. The core idea of a raga remains the same. The core of the film is that we as humans have to look at the world with more attention and hear with more intent. And the way the scientists and Biki were looking at the moths on the screen, there was that intention. We were trying to derive from that core and expand that into an immersive visual and aural experience.
And how do you do that?
AD: You can only do that when you don’t use an image for functionality, but you use it for evocation. That was the core idea in terms of both image and sound. Then we translated that into the edit. We had a wonderful cinematographer, Satya Rai Nagpal, and Sukanta Majumdar, a fantastic sound recordist. And our editor, Yaël Bitton, who edited the film with Anu.
Everybody who’s watched the film talks about the sound design. I was at times brushing my shoulder thinking there’s a moth on me. How did that come about?
AS: We were surrounded by these amazing sounds. Within half an hour, the sounds of the forest would change. At one point, all the little birds would be chirping because it’s their feeding time. Then the crickets would take over, and then the rain and thunder. We wanted to be mindful of the sounds of the forest, and we knew that that would be a huge part of the film. The visuals were of course very intriguing but we needed that sound to create that immersion, because it’s exactly what we experienced there.
“You have to think of sound as much as you think of image.”
AD: We believe that you have to think of sound as much as you think of image when you are conceptualizing a project. With the Sukanta, we wondered how we’d record the sound of scratching of the canvas when the moths were walking on it. So he clipped the mic on the canvas. We would record the 360-degree sound. We had very, very specific microphones. Neethu Mohandas, the sound recordist, and I went to every elevation the scientists had worked on, at different times and seasons. A chirping of the bird in spring will never be the same in the summer so we will never use that in a summer shot. We were very specific in terms of altitude, time and season. So that is why you hear what you hear in the film. We went through six months of post-production in sound, thanks to our Sandbox Films.
Documentary filmmakers often think they need to make a big issue-based political statement, and yours is only an oblique comment on climate change. Didn’t you feel pressured to make more of a statement?
AS: Our main impetus is always to find a cinematic expression for what we are feeling. More than an issue, it was a more philosophical point we were trying to go after. How do you question the anthropocentric gaze? We had three elements: the scientist and her team, the forest and the moths. We wanted to show human beings as part of that nature, and not as the only thing that’s interesting or important. We wanted to see moths for their own sake, and not just because Mansi likes them. For us, this is political too. Choosing to make a film with shots that are held longer, that asks the audience for something different than what the majority of films ask of them. It’s a political decision to slow down.
You found all these fantastic creative collaborators who believed in your visions. But in this post-pandemic market, how do you trust your audience to understand your vision?
AD: When 20-20 [shortened format] cricket started, everybody thought that [multi-day] test matches were over. But if you go to see the Ashes in England, the stadiums are full. It’s all about the quality of what’s on offer. There is a sanctity, a very spiritual experience when the lights are turned off and you watch films together with people. We are happy to take that chance, and we feel that people will understand. They will feel that there is beauty left in the world.
How has making this film transformed you and your art?
AS: It was just incredibly rewarding to work with Mansi and Bicki and to see the way she was interacting with the whole team. I think that was a huge learning experience for us, because she was so egalitarian and in such a class-ridden society like India. Being in the forest, we were forced to slow down ourselves, get off our devices. I check my messages every two minutes but when I went there, there was an alternative given to me, and that was beautiful. I think it’s the possibility that you give yourself, and that’s what we want to share with the audience too.
Anirban, have your children watched this film?
AD: My daughter, who is in high school, watched it at the Sydney Film Festival, and she said that she felt very emotional watching the film. My friend’s son watched the film and he said, “Next time I’ll come with my friends and get raincoats, because it almost felt like we might get wet.”
The post What Quiet Meditation on an Eastern Himalayan Moth Can Teach Us appeared first on Truthdig.
