To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) Canada |

To Kill a Tiger
Nisha Pahuja
Canada. 2022. 125 min

On the night of a family wedding in a village in India, Ranjit’s 13-year-old daughter is dragged into the woods and gang raped by three men. Ranjit takes on the fight of his life when he demands the accused be brought to justice. With tremendous access to all facets of the story, To Kill a Tiger charts the emotional journey of an ordinary man thrown into extraordinary circumstances—a father whose love for his daughter forces a social reckoning that will reverberate for years to come.

NISHA PAHUJA

Nisha Pahuja is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Toronto and Bombay. Her credits include Diamond Road (2007 Gemini Award for Best Documentary Series), Bollywood Bound (2001 Gemini nominee) and the award-winning The World Before Her (2012; Best Documentary, Tribeca Film Festival; Best Canadian Documentary, Hot Docs Film Festival; TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten; Sundance Film Forward Program; Best Documentary nominee, CSAs). Pahuja’s short film for Global’s 16/9 about the Delhi Gang rape was the recipient of an Amnesty International media award for Canadian journalism in 2015. In 2014, she was invited to be a Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and from 2016 to 2020 she was part of their arts selection panel.

DIRECTOR,S NOTE

To Kill a Tiger actually started off as an entirely different film. That film, called Send Us Your Brother, was a more pointed and direct exploration of Indian masculinity. The focus of the original work was Mahendra Kumar, the women’s rights activist who has a key, albeit minor, role in To Kill a Tiger.

Mahendra was leading a large-scale program in Jharkhand, where he and other activists worked with men and boys to change their ideas on gender. One of the men enrolled in that program was Ranjit.

To Kill a Tiger took eight years to make. It represents the amalgamation of many people’s creative talents and commitment to the story—composer Jonathan Goldsmith, Music editor Jordan Kawai, assistant editor Pranay Nichani, story editor Manfred Becker, Executive Producer Anita Lee and Producers David Oppenheim and the formidable Cornelia Principe.

To the NFB I owe a deep and abiding gratitude for supporting this long and jagged journey and for their faith in me as a filmmaker. Thanks must also be given to our Executive Producers—Andy Cohen, Drew Dragoumis and Atul Gawande and to Mala Gaonkar—for their generosity, creativity and never saying no to watching a cut!