A root awakening: The short film Murmurs of the Jungle is not to be missed

In the mist that drapes the Western Ghats, stories emerge from the trees. Set against a background score of cricket chirps and bird calls, only those who truly listen will hear them.

These are stories about gods forced to take refuge under certain trees. About the first man, emerging from a local pond. About a deity that rose from the lowest caste.

The stories seep into each other, as they are retold through sylvan monsoon days, in the short film Murmurs of the Jungle. We see some of the speakers, in fleeting glimpses; they rarely face the camera. What often takes up the screen is a deep forest, majestic and draped in mist; people just a concession it allows on its fringes.
Directed by Sohil Vaidya, the 20-minute film won the National Award for Best Documentary in October. In the year of its release, 2022, it became the first Indian work to win the Grand Prix for Best Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Murmurs… isn’t really a documentary. In fact, Vaidya says he doesn’t like that term.
“We have so much information about everything now that we’ve long since departed from that original intent of pure documentation,” says Vaidya, 35. “Documentaries, I believe, should rise above mere documentation. They should be works of cinema.”
Murmurs… certainly is one.
It is spellbinding but does not seek to dramatise. It moves slowly, embracing silences and stillness.
Seconds go by as a single giant tree, or a tiny hamlet, emerges from the mist.
There is no artificial light; no zooms or pans.
There is no plot. No music. Only the unfolding of the everyday, captured in stunning cinema verité by cinematographer Digvijay Thorat.
The soundscape is carefully crafted to mirror the drifting voices of an evening spent by the edge of a village (in a striking effort by sound recordist Pradyumna Chaware).
The viewer is never told who is speaking, or offered context. There are ancient tales, being passed on as they always have been, in abstract, in good faith, and in an effort to guide the tribe.
“My grandmother used to say that the shadow of the lamp lit after a person’s demise shows what they will be in the next birth,” a voice says. “Signs like the legs of a bird or an animal… If it’s a snake, then the shape of its wiggling tail…”
Stranger things
Vaidya was trying to shoot a thriller when the film, in a sense, happened to him.
Scouting for locations in the remote region, during the pandemic-era lockdowns, he found himself spending days with Adivasi tribals who lived more closely with the land than anything he had experienced before.
In the evenings, they told him their stories: strange tales of a man who went to live in a tree, or a woman who would be reborn a tigress.
The stories linked the worlds of hamlet and forest, but beyond that, seemed to serve no purpose, as we understand the word. They offered no moral; contained no action or adventure.
Sensing the rarity of this, Vaidya abandoned his thriller in favour of a new project. Could he use his camera, and yet turn off all artifice, in a way that would capture the essence of these stories? Could he do justice to what was being shared with him, and was already being lost: to a dying way of life, to migration, to the glare of the smartphone. Could he capture the sense of a meaning that had already slipped just beyond our reach?
(The answer, when one watches Murmurs of the Jungle, is overwhelmingly in the affirmative.)
“These were not superstitions. Rather, I saw them as part of the human story, with hidden metaphors that we are fast forgetting,” Vaidya says. “They were metaphorical, abstract, so I wanted the film to be the same way. It couldn’t ‘conclude’ or have ‘a message’. Most importantly, it couldn’t be dramatised.”
Origin story
Vaidya, who studied computer engineering in Pune, grew up in love with the theatre. Working backstage, he liked to reimagine the scenes playing out under the lights. How would he have directed them?
He borrowed a friend’s camera to make his first film, a documentary called Diaries of Unknown (2013), about undocumented residents of Pune. They were ghosts of a kind, he says; people with no official paperwork to their names.
In 2018, he completed a five-year Master of Fine Arts degree at University of Southern California (USC). His thesis film, Difficult People, about a father-son relationship after the loss of the mother, won him the prestigious Directors Guild of America Student Award in 2018.
Back in India, he turned his sights on the neighbourhood watch repairer, Dinesh Deshpande, whose love for his profession kept him going even as the world around him changed, many times over. The result was the documentary short The Timekeeper (2019).
Then came the pandemic. When Vaidya ventured into the Western Ghats, he already had other worlds on his mind. “Death was all around us,” he says. “It made me think that there had to be something beyond our material existence.”
Something about the Adivasi people, holding onto their ancient beliefs, made him think perhaps some version of another world had always been right here, just out of sight.
Back in an expanding, bustling, Pune, it worries him, he says, that we know no other way of life but the “horribly industrial”.
“We wouldn’t be able to survive in nature today, because we’ve completely lost all connection with it,” he says. All we seem to have learnt in its place, he adds, is how to erode, extract, destroy.
Back for lore
Vaidya will soon return to the jungle, to tell a very different story. His next film will be the feature-length psychological thriller based on folk tales that he had originally set out to make.
“The National Award helps, but you can’t depend on an experimental film, even if it’s won the country’s top honour, to get you the kind of funding you need,” he says, laughing.
One can still hope, he adds. The Korean entertainment industry manages to make room, in mainstream theatres and on streaming platforms, for arthouse films and independent filmmakers.
“They make films that are great as art and are also audience-friendly. That’s where I aspire to be.”