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Logline
In the forests of south India, an extraordinary friendship between an Indian American doctor and the Chenchus opens a rare window into an indigenous community fighting to preserve its history, dignity, and home in a rapidly changing India.
Synopsis
In 1998, a young American student ventures into the forests of south India to study tigers. What he finds instead changes the course of his life.
Over the next two decades, he returns again and again to the villages of the Chenchu people, a tribal community whose roots run as deep as the ancient forests they call home. Friendships deepen. Children grow up. And the world around them begins to close in.
Joined by a historian friend, the two men embark on something more than a documentary. It is an act of witnessing. In kitchens and on porches, beside cooking fires and in the shadow of the sacred temple of Srisailam, they listen. They dig through folklore, historical records, and popular culture to unearth stories that have long been buried beneath a single, reductive label: primitive tribal group. What emerges is a portrait of a community that is complex, resilient, and alive.
Shot across breathtaking forest landscapes, with aerial imagery, original artwork, and rare archival material, Eternal Trees, Eternal Mountains is as visually arresting as it is emotionally urgent. It is a film about belonging and loss, about what is threatened by the relentless march of industrialization.
Directors’ Statement
I have spent half my life trying to understand what it means to belong somewhere.
When I first arrived in a Chenchu village as a twenty-year-old, I was welcomed with a generosity I hadn't earned and didn't fully understand. Malliah and his family gave me their home, their fire, their time. Something took root in me that I couldn't name then. The other week each month, I shared a room in Hyderabad with Chris, who was deep in his own research of the region. Over dosas at a hole-in-the-wall, we talked about belonging and about living between worlds: the city and the forest, India and the West. We didn't know then that we were already making something together.
When I returned a decade later, within minutes, Malliah's brother came running to meet me. Old warmth rushed back, but I was still a guest, an outsider with a camera. This tension never left me. It made our film more honest. We filmed with no script and no agenda — just trust, curiosity, and the warmth of people willing to share both their joy and their pain.
Post-production strengthened and tested our twenty-five year friendship. Chris wanted to excavate structural forces and history; I wanted to follow emotion and image. We fought for our visions. And ultimately, we needed both. This film is the honest record of that journey and of a love for a community that changed us.
— Harsha S. Reddy and Chris Chekuri
