‘Tiger 24’: Award-winning animal rights film scheduled for theatrical release
Were Tiger 24's kills defensive or offensive? Depending on whom you ask, T24 is a man-eater who deserves to be quarantined from potential human contact, or an innocent victim of man’s encroachment into his territory.
MATT GROBAR: Toronto’s Elevation Pictures has picked up North American rights to Warren Pereira’s feature documentary Tiger 24, executive produced by The Gotham Group. The film has begun a limited theatrical release which includes a week’s run at the Laemmle’s Monica Film Center (Los Angeles), starting September 30. It will subsequently release on all transactional VOD platforms in North America on November 15. SOURCE…
JOHN THOMASON: When Warren Pereira set out to make a documentary about the most beloved beast in India’s Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, some 10 years ago, he wasn’t expecting his movie to capture a controversy with global implications. He wasn’t expecting to document one of the key animal-rights debates of our time. And he wasn’t expecting to interview the families of loved ones whose lives were cut short by his subject.
A labor of love for eight complicated years, “Tiger 24” explores the fraught, and ongoing, saga of T24, the so-called “king of kings” in a prominent Indian tiger reserve who, over the course of Pereria’s intermittent filming, allegedly kills four humans. The last of these deaths, involving longtime forest ranger Rampal Saini, in May of 2015, leads to T24’s removal from the reserve and his transfer to a cramped zoo, and ignites a firestorm of attention from opposing sides. Were his kills defensive or offensive? Depending on whom you ask, T24 is a man-eater who deserves to be quarantined from potential human contact, or an innocent victim of man’s encroachment into his territory…
Pereira’s film, originally intended to be an immersive nature documentary, becomes something more engrossing—an examination of the thorny issues surrounding these murky fatalities, with history, bureaucracy and geography factoring as significantly as animal instinct. The habitats of Bengal tigers, Pereira shows us, have greatly diminished over the decades, owing to the popularity of hunting and the expansion of the human population.
Not only are tigers hemmed in to smaller areas (less than 2 percent of Indian land); they often abut local villages, and in the case of Ranthambore — the scene of the crimes — there is no buffer between the reserve and the human community, just an easily scalable wall. We learn that, though a governing body is supposed to maintain standards involving dangerous tiger-human contact, its own regulations were not followed.
The director, in his feature-length debut, narrates these details with deliberation and lucidity, suspecting perhaps that his movie will be shown in classrooms one day, or even a courtroom. Indeed, “Tiger 24” at times feels like a forensic mystery, complete with eyewitness testimony and clear, illustrated timelines of the events in question. SOURCE…
MATT GROBAR: World premiering at this year’s Cleveland Film Festival, Tiger 24 is a finalist at the Jackson Wild Media Awards and has two nominations at Wildscreen Festival, where previous winners include My Octopus Teacher. Pic also claimed Best Documentary at last week’s Burbank Film Festival. Pereira served as the film’s producer, with The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Jeremy Bell exec producing alongside Eagle Egilsson, Howard Barish, Zach Mann and Stephen Nemeth. SOURCE…
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