Nocturnes is an aesthetic treat as well as informative introduction to the world of hawk moth field research (Film review)

  

Hong Kong International Film Festival 

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Nocturnes (India-U.S.A., 2024)

- Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, co-directors

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Reality Bites program

 

A few days before this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival got going, a friend and I were telling each other about which offerings we had got tickets for.  Upon doing so, he casually remarked that he was surprised that, given my love of critter spottings (including of butterflies and moths) while out hiking in Hong Kong, I didn't have Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivisan's Nocturnes on my list. 

After he did that, I went and checked out the synopsis for it in the HKIFF program booklet -- and determined that this documentary about research conducted in the forest of the Eastern Himalayas into the hawk moth of Arunachal Pradesh did indeed sound right up my alley.  At the same time, I still was very pleasantly surprised that Nocturnes turned out to be such an aesthetic treat even while also imparting information on such as the size and look of the hawk moth, the elevations at which it can be found, and how climate change can and will affect the life of the species. 

Mansi Mungee is an ecologist whom the filmmakers at a "food joint" in the Himalayas, where they had gone to make a film on snow leopard habitats.  When she told them about how her research involved going at night to set up moth screens on which hundreds, even thousands, of insects are attracted to when light is shone on it, they decided to capture this nocturnal scenes and enterprise on film (with the help of cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul).  And also install multiple mics to record not only the conversation of Mansi and her assistants (all of them indigenous individuals local to the area -- the chief of whom is Bicki, from the Bugun community) as they meticulously and patiently carry out their rigorous work but also the sounds of the forest that include the flapping of the wings of the moths and other insects in the film.

This results in Nocturne being an impressively immersive and textured work that encourages and rewards those viewers happy to look and listen at what nature is willing to reveal. At the same time, I think the documentary also gets its viewers appreciating and enjoying the dedication and passion of the chief human in the picture, and feel privileged to be privy to the academic discussions Mansi has with her mentor (Ramana Athrey) as well as the bonding and humanising chats she has with her obliging assistants.  

 

On a lingustic note: Hindi and Bugun is spoken in the film but the documentary's primary language is English.  Much of Nocturnes is dialogue-less though.  And while this might bother some people unused to this -- and get them feeling that time drags as a result -- there are others who will feel that it makes for a meditative viewing experience that actually works out to both relaxing and stimulating -- and generally very satisfying indeed.  So much so, in fact, that I think I would have been happy for this 82 minute length work to have had a running time that was closer to 100 minutes! :)

My rating for this film: 8.0