How Young Filmmakers From the Northeast Are Using Their Cameras To Protect India’s Hidden Forests

For the communities living along Assam’s Ripu Forest Reserve, the forest is like a beloved child — one they’ve seen grow, change, and flourish over the years. In 2021, these biodiversity-rich foothills were declared the Raimona National Park — Assam’s sixth national park — spanning 422 sq km and home to over 150 butterfly species, Bengal tigers, clouded leopards, gaurs (Indian bison), and chitals (spotted deer).

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Behind this milestone lies a lesser-known local movement — led by 35-year-old Tunu Basumatary, a member of Assam’s Bodo community, who mobilised his people to protect the forest they call home.

Tunu’s reverence for the forest runs deep — stitched into his faith and childhood memories. “When I was a child, we’d see so many golden langurs and pangolins here,” he recalls. Watching their numbers dwindle over the years was heartbreaking, with poaching emerging as a major threat. But Tunu was determined that the buck would stop with his generation.

Soon after clearing his Class 12 exams, he joined a youth movement dedicated to conserving the golden langur — an endangered species endemic to the forest belt of Western Assam — and the Chinese pangolin, listed as critically endangered.

“We started this programme in 2006, wanting to protect the forest,” Tunu explains. He shares that their work alongside the Forest Department to check on illegalities and poaching of the animals earned each youth a stipend of a few thousand rupees a month.

What started with a few youngsters soon swelled into an army of 200. For years, their work lay in the shadows, a footnote in the conservation archives. Until one day, Tunu was handed a camera. 

Tell your story of conservation, he was encouraged. And he did.

You can see it for yourself.

GreenHub: Opening doors for young changemakers in conservation

The camera rendered Tunu’s stories a vocabulary he lacked. With every shot he took, he understood the forest much better. And behind this brilliant idea of encouraging youth from marginalised communities to document their conservation stories is GreenHub.

Started in 2014 by Rita Banerji, one of India’s foremost environmental filmmakers and an Ashoka Fellow, who has three Panda Award-winning films (internationally recognised accolade for natural world storytelling, often called the ‘Green Oscars’), GreenHub was founded on the premise that conservation takes a village — literally and metaphorically.

“One may have great ideas about conservation, but the work required for it to become possible takes a lot of people. GreenHub started with the idea of creating that large force of people,” she emphasises.

For someone whose own understanding of conservation developed through films, Rita was keen on creating an initiative hinged on the same. “Video is such a fantastic tool of observation. You have to go into the field to shoot something. You have to witness something. It’s a beautiful tool of learning,” she notes.

A collaborative initiative by North East Network (NEN) and Dusty Foot Productions (DFP), the programme is built around a one-year fellowship that trains youth from across Northeast India in the technical and creative aspects of filming, editing, and storytelling — helping them bring to life untold stories of the land, its people, and their generational wisdom. These stories challenge and redefine what is considered worthy of attention.

One of the beneficiaries of the fellowship is former hunter Wanmei Konyak, who took the reins of leading his Nagaland village in restoring degraded jhum (slash and burn cultivation) lands and reviving lost wildlife through community-driven eco-restoration.

Or there’s the story of Sungsalee — a first-of-its-kind, community-owned museum in North Sikkim — that celebrates and documents the rich culture and ecological wisdom of the Lepcha people. It’s the brainchild of Seela Lepcha, who curated it to help preserve her vanishing tribe’s heritage. The camera (and the technical know-how rendered by the GreenHub team) simply helped her articulate it into a form that could reach the world’s eyes.

Every documentary spotlights a world where tribal stories and conservation efforts sit together, not in opposition but in dialogue.

From Arunachal Pradesh’s Tirap district, where youth leaders Chajo Lowang and Sara Khongsai have woven Nocte tribal folklore with local wildlife in a unique book raising awareness about hunting and deforestation, to Assam’s Baksa district, where Rangjalu Basumatary has built a grassroots youth movement to protect the critically endangered Bengal florican through awareness drives and florican-friendly farming — each story reflects a deep commitment to nature.

One film journeys to Nagaland’s Noklak district, where Thangsoi M Khaimniungan documents how local youth are restoring forests, recording biodiversity, and protecting hoolock gibbons. 

Another turns its lens on Meghalaya, following Khasi naturalist Rejoice Gassah, who uses birding and photography to inspire young people while contributing vital data to citizen science and documenting Karimganj’s forests.

Together, these visuals illuminate how young changemakers are reviving native biodiversity and emerging as its steadfast guardians.

Bringing voices from the margins to the global stage

From December through March every year, Rita and the team at GreenHub find themselves in a dilemma. You see, this is the time when the call for applications for the fellowship opens. Sifting through incredible ideas, attempting to distill the selections down to 20 youth isn’t the easiest task.

But the National Geographic-CMS Prithvi Ratna Award winner, Rita, knows what she’s looking for. She has a way of spotting the kind of stories that have the power to transcend the screen and spark real world impact.

She elaborates on the process, “We get a lot of applications; from the Northeast regions themselves, we get around 200 to 250 applications. During the application period, we try to reach remote areas through regional newspapers and fellow networks. The aim is for the maximum number of people to get to know about the fellowship. Over time, we started physically visiting these sites where there was no network, so we could inform more people. This is followed by phone interviews; 80 people are selected based on the interviews.”

So what really is the make-or-break criterion?

Passion for one’s land, Rita answers.

“You may be someone who's never been to school, and that’s fine. You needn’t know how to use the camera. What we're looking at are strong reasons why these youth are applying to the fellowship. We try to understand their perspective, what they want to do in the future,” she adds. The search is for youth who are stewarding their resources to save nature.

When video becomes an instrument of change

‘Mizoram’s Dampa: A tiger reserve without tigers’ reads the headline in the Frontline. The report goes on to underscore that the reserve has been tigerless for two years. Poaching and hunting seem to be to blame.

A Mizoram-based birder and wildlife filmmaker, Lalvohbika, is working with fringe villages around Dampa Tiger Reserve to reduce hunting and raise awareness about biodiversity through nature walks, birding, and documentation of rare species.

This sentiment of eco-tourism is also being popularised by Dawa Tsangpo Bhutia in the remote village of Chongri, West Sikkim. Dawa hails from the Bhutia yak-herding community, and through the Yambong Ecotourism Committee, he’s attempting to preserve traditional lifestyles, promote eco-tourism, and drive community-led efforts in waste management and sustainability.

Through their documentaries (funded by GreenHub), youth like Dawa and Lalvohbika are urging their tribes to hold up their end of the bargain — an effort directed towards ensuring nature does not suffer at the expense of their needs.

What most thrills Rita and the team is watching the youth’s efforts translate into real-world impact.

Proof of this lies in Tunu’s stories, which are coloured by decoy operations directed towards saving pangolins and golden langurs by persistent patrolling. Reports suggest an uptick in the latter’s numbers — from 474 in the first survey (From December 2006 to January 2007) to 7,396 (2020-2021).

Catering the programme to youth from fringe communities is important. As Rita emphasises, “I wanted those who did not have any access to training or exposure to be our target group. And the fact that this is a residential fellowship gives us a clear understanding of the communities through their eyes.”

“Our interactions are not just conversations, but through the films they're doing. Once they go into the field and return with the footage, we sit with them through the mentoring process. That's when a lot of things happen, where we learn about them, and they learn about us.”

These conversations form the inflection point.

“Many of the youth feel that their knowledge is not good enough. But when they're sitting and looking at the footage — the farming patterns, the crops grown, the arrivals of certain birds and how these indicate the advent of a season — they start seeing appreciation for their kind of knowledge. That’s where they think to themselves, ‘What I know is also valued’.”

And the biggest lesson that these documentaries spotlight is that, to rewild the world, one first needs to rewild one’s imagination. And sometimes, all it takes is a camera.

Apply for the next cohort here.

This story is part of a content series by The Better India and GreenHub.

All pictures courtesy GreenHub

This story was made possible with the support of Aditya Maru, who helped facilitate the interviews.

'Mizoram’s Dampa: A tiger reserve without tigers': by Himmat Rana, Published on 22 February 2024.

'India’s golden langur population estimated at 7,396': by Rahul Karmakar, Published on 9 March 2024.

'Status and Conservation of Golden Langur in Chakrashila Wildlife Sanctuary, Assam, India', Published in Assam State Portal in January 2011.