DN:FILM Tigerland
In TIGERLAND, Oscar-winning director Ross Kauffman (“Born into Brothels”) prowls the jungles of India and stalks the snowy forests of Far East Russia to both explore the harrowing world of tiger poaching and connect with the humans risking their lives to save the endangered cats. Tracing the impassioned efforts of two conservationists, Pavel Fomenko in Russia and the late Kailash Sankhala in India, the Discovery Channel film hews to the classic soul-pricking tropes of myriad animal advocacy docs—the recent “Sharkwater Extinction” and “Tigerland” producer Fisher Stevens’ own dolphin-slaughter expose “The Cove” spring to mind. The new film’s exquisite stars are introduced as solitary creatures of majesty and menace, brawny splendor and irrepressible predatory instincts. Indeed, Fomenko has a grisly (off-camera) tangle with a cat, and the movie doesn’t shy from the disfiguring aftermath.
Prized for their silky striped pelts and the purported medicinal powers of their organs, tigers are on the fast track to extinction—“the loss of something divine,” Fomenko laments. Less than 540 Siberian tigers remain in the Russian Far East, down from 100,000 in 1900. Forty-thousand wild tigers once roamed Central India; 2,300 survive today. “Tigerland” unapologetically tugs at our heartstrings and pursestrings—it's linked to a fundraising project—as it toggles between beauty and banality, the visceral and the clinical. Despite some rote visuals, such as repeated scenes of tag-and-release, this burnished cry from the wilderness is one of exceptional urgency.