Welcome to the jungle: Richie Mehta on 'Poacher'

Richie Mehta on his new series and the challenges of following up 'Delhi Crime' with a different sort of procedural

- Udita Jhunjhunwala

When writer and director Richie Mehta opted not to helm the second season of his hit 2019 Netflix show Delhi Crime, there was curiosity about what he would take up next. It later emerged that Mehta, who is based in Canada, had been working on another fiction series based on true events. In Poacher, he trains his lens on the issue of elephant poaching. The eight-episode series looks at an elephant poaching ring in Kerala and the larger illegal ivory trade. The crime drama, streaming on Amazon Prime Video from 23 February, features an accomplished ensemble cast, including Nimisha Sajayan (The Great Indian Kitchen), Roshan Mathew (Moothon) and Dibyendu Bhattacharya (Rocket Boys). Mehta spoke to Mint about how he chanced upon this story that led to the series, and how he went about realising this very specific world.

How did you identify the story that resulted in ‘Poacher’?

I was directing the documentary India in a Day (backed by Google) in 2015. In that film, people all over India were meant to shoot footage of their own lives on their phones on one particular day—10 October 2015—upload it to me, and I would assemble it into a feature-length documentary that profiles a day in the life of the country.