Nisha Pahuja’s ‘To Kill A Tiger’ Gets Oscar Nod
Photo: Nisha Pahuja and Dev Patel on CNN during an interview with Christiana Amanpour.
India-West News Desk
LOS ANGELES, CA – The documentary film ‘To Kill a Tiger’, directed by Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja, has been nominated for the 2024 edition of the Oscar Awards. The film has been nominated in the Documentary Feature Film category.
The fellow nominees are ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’, ‘The Eternal Memory’, ‘Four Daughters’, and ‘20 Days in Mariupol’.
‘To Kill a Tiger’ follows the story of a family in Jharkhand, who are campaigning for justice after their teenage daughter was brutally raped. It has been executive produced by Dev Patel and Mindy Kaling.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2022. It had its American premiere at the Lighthouse International Film Festival in June 2023.
The film’s official website states the story, “Ranjit goes to the police, and the men are arrested. But Ranjit’s relief is short-lived, as the villagers and their leaders launch a sustained campaign to force the family to drop the charges. A cinematic documentary, ‘To Kill a Tiger’ follows Ranjit’s uphill battle to find justice for his child”.
Pahuja moved from India to Canada with her family when she was a child in the early 1970s. She studied at the University of Toronto, to write fiction. A chance meeting with local Canadian Producer, Geeta Sondhi, who hired her as a researcher on the CBC documentary “Some Kind of Arrangement” set her on the path to documentary filmmaking.
Her films have been successful internationally including North America and India. ‘The World Before Her,’ explored the complex and conflicting environment for young girls in India by following women participating in the Miss India Pageant as well as girls being trained in the Durga Vahini, the women’s wing of the VHP. “The World Before Her” premiered at the Tribeca International Film Festival where it won the Best Documentary award. The film went on to screen at numerous festivals worldwide picking up several awards along the way including Best Canadian Documentary Hot Docs and the Vancouver Film Critics’ Best Canadian Documentary Award.
Pahuja’s latest film, To Kill a Tiger, had its world premiere at TIFF where it won the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. Since then, it has won 19 awards including Best Documentary Feature at Palm Springs International Film Festival, and three Canadian Screen awards including the Ted Rogers award for Best Feature Length Documentary 2023 and the Beyond the Screen Award at Doc Aviv 2023.
The 2024 Oscars will be held here on March 10 at the Dolby Theatre. Jimmy Kimmel will host it.
