Tiger documentary, by award-winning crew and narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, to be released on Earth Day

Making a wildlife documentary isn’t easy. The whole “never work with children or animals” credo becomes exponentially more apt when said animals are wild. You can’t control what they do. You can’t predict how they’ll behave with a great degree of certainty. And you are at the mercy of filming in their natural environment, along with anything else that lives in it. But, even considering the normal challenges of producing wildlife documentaries, making one about tigers in the lush forests of India is particularly difficult — even for acclaimed filmmakers Mark Linfield and Vanessa Berlowitz, the husband and wife team who have spent years working on docos such as Planet Earth with Sir David Attenborough. So when Disney set up a division to produce feature-length wildlife documentaries about 15 years ago, and asked the pair to make one on tigers — consumer research by the Mouse House found the animal topped polls in 44 countries and every US state — Linfield and Berlowitz politely said no. “Tigers are so hard,” Linfield says over a Zoom call with Berlowitz and STM. “You have to choose your moment when everything comes together — you’ve got the right tigers and right location, with the right local assistance — and at that time, we just felt it was too difficult. “So, we went on and made shows (for Disney) about chimpanzees and about bears and about monkeys and elephants.” Then during the making of 2020’s Elephant, everything did come together. “We started getting calls from our colleagues in India . . . so we basically went back to Disney and said, ‘If you want a tiger show, now’s the time, but don’t hang around’. Luckily they said yes,” Linfield says. Berlowitz says the timing was right from a conservation perspective, too, with numbers of tigers in the wild jumping from a low of around 1500 to more than 3600 — a wildlife success story that’s all too rare. Then the hard work began. First came identifying a specific group of tigers to focus on — in this case, Ambar, a young tigress, raising her cubs against a backdrop of forest perils, such as pythons, bears and marauding male tigers. Then, having captured never-seen-before footage over an astonishing 1500 shooting days, this incredible vision needed the perfect narrator. ”We had a shortlist of one, so we were so relieved when (Indian superstar actor) Priyanka Chopra Jonas agreed to do it,” Linfield admits. “Priyanka is obsessed with tigers, and would lend the film an authenticity, plus we think she’s just got a great voice — we felt it was a fantastic fit.” Tiger will be released on Disney Plus on Earth Day, April 22.