- Three journalists create in-depth news documentaries exploring how environmental change directly affects human health across India.
- The films set in coastal Maharashtra, Odisha, and Rajasthan, premiere at the All Living Things Environment Film Festival 2025 before releasing on Mongabay-India.
- From industrial pollution to extreme heat, the filmmakers reveal urgent, underreported stories, grounded in evidence and impactful visuals.
Over the past few months, three journalists produced environmental news documentaries that probed the links between environmental change and human health. For some, it was their first film; for others, their first attempt at in-depth visual storytelling. What united them was journalistic rigour and a willingness to experiment.
For three consecutive editions, Mongabay-India has partnered with the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF) for the Video Reporting Opportunity, which commissions original environmental reportage. Earlier cohorts explored urban biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge, and grassroots solutions. This year, the fellowship turned its lens to one of the most urgent themes of our time: the intersection of environment and health.
The films premiere at ALT EFF 2025 (December 4–14) before reaching wider audiences on Mongabay-India’s platforms. The filmmakers will join post-screening conversations reflecting on their work, process, and experiences behind the camera.
Subscribe to Mongabay-India’s YouTube channel and set reminders to get notified when the films release online.
Walking Against The Heat
By Divya Vilvaraj and Aishwarya Mohanty
In Rajasthan, a way of life is disappearing quietly. Hyderabad-based filmmaker Divya Vilvaraj and journalist Aishwarya Mohanty spent a week alongside the Raikas, a nomadic agropastoralist community, during a segment of their annual migration on foot.
Mohanty had long been intrigued by the Raikas she saw near her home in Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh. If water, grazing lands, and livestock are threatened, what does it mean for a nomadic community as climate change intensifies? The lack of documentation concerned her.
“Agropastoralism is often described as climate-resilient,” Mohanty says. “Yet no one talks about the direct toll climate change takes on pastoralist lives, their health, mobility, safety, and their ability to sustain their herds.”
Filming during nautapa, nine days of intense pre-monsoon heat, tested the team. Cameras overheated, the car broke down, and scenes were missed. Meanwhile, the Raikas navigated their routes using knowledge passed down through generations, now disrupted by rising temperatures and land-use change.
Vilvaraj noted how rarely the community spoke about heat, despite how much it shaped their days. Was it resilience or helplessness? A question journalists keep returning to.
One serendipitous encounter stayed with the team: an elder, Nathuramji, who spoke candidly about the exhaustion of migration. “Some days, we feel so tired and unwell that we want to quit this work… What could happen if we die?” he asks. “But the next morning, we think, if we don’t do this, then what?”
For Mohanty, the experience highlighted the importance of pre-reporting for news documentaries; for Vilvaraj, the importance of trusting the process.
Tainted Waters
By Amitha Balachandra
When Mumbai-based journalist Amitha Balachandra first visited Tarapur, a coastal town struggling with industrial pollution, it was for another assignment. But the stench of the water and the stories she heard stayed with her.
Through repeated reporting trips in the heat and heavy rain, she followed petitioners, read court documents, and spent time with families coping with a degraded coastline and polluted creek. Her film documents persistent health issues and a community fighting for compensation.
It also reveals the hidden links between local environmental conditions, health, well-being, and local economics. After skin issues forced ferry operator Mahendra to stop venturing into the creek for a few months, he hired someone else to keep the boat operational. “Otherwise, people have to spend more on travelling. They will travel 15 km instead of 7 km,” he says.
“As an independent journalist, these are the stories I believe must be told, the ones that move beyond the churn of breaking news,” she says.
Crafting the narrative was challenging. The film draws from court cases, medical practitioners, RTI documents, and lived experiences, while making explicit what is known and what is uncertain. Environmental health stories often struggle with establishing direct causal links,” says Balachandra. Her film reflects that complexity without reducing the urgency.
When The Body Can’t Cool
By Aishwarya Tripathi
For Unnao-based journalist Aishwarya Tripathi, this fellowship marked her first attempt at filmmaking. Her film examines how rising heat affects people with spinal cord injuries (SCI) in Odisha, a condition that impairs the body’s ability to sweat or regulate temperature.
Access was among her biggest challenges. Long journeys through rural Odisha sometimes ended in closed doors or refusals. Many families had already been through laborious compensation claims, medical paperwork, and slow rehabilitation systems; allowing a camera into their lives required trust.
“It was important to hold all the emotions they expressed, their frustrations, routines, hopes, without slipping into pity or heroism,” Tripathi says.
At a sports stadium, para-athlete Kamalakant described heat-induced pain as if someone were “wringing your muscles.” Disability-rights advocate Sruti Mohapatra stressed the need to recognise SCI as a separate category for policy and rehabilitation and to involve patients in decision-making.
Tripathi also witnessed how misinformation fills gaps left by weak healthcare systems — patients being misled into believing massages are “cures” or being shuttled between hospitals. “It hit me how deeply we lack disability rehabilitation and how it shapes a person’s ability to live with dignity,” she recalls.
Her biggest lesson? “I realised how crucial it is to share my own vulnerabilities so that people feel safe to share theirs,” she says.
Why these stories matter
The programme’s aim is simple: expand the community of environmental journalists using film as a tool for evidence-based storytelling.
Each film surfaces perspectives rarely centred in mainstream reporting: a coastal community defending its health and habitat, people with spinal cord injuries coping with a hotter world, and nomadic pastoralists navigating an unpredictable landscape. They are not quick stories; they are stories that stay with you.
Subscribe to Mongabay-India’s YouTube channel to get notified when the films release online.
Banner image: Raika community members walk with their camels. Image by Aishwarya Mohanty.
Credits
