L'Arc et la Flûte

The young Chendru lives in Bastar with his grandfather, his cousin Ginjo and Ginjo´s wife, Riga, who is not from the Muria community. One day a leopard comes nearby the village. This is the beginning of a serial of dramatic events, involving lives of both animals and human beings.
After having explored the nature and wild-life in his own country (Sweden), Sucksdorff took his cameras, his crew and his imagination to Bastar, a little village in the heart of India.
(For the first time loaded with colour film), his hand-picked crew and his imagination to Bastar, a little jungle village in the heart of India. Bastar is populated by Murias, aboriginals with a great urge to live happily together in peace. To live and let live...
Like Renoir and later Rossellini, Sucksdorff was fascinated by India. En Djungelsaga is a film on life in and around a village in the Bastar region in central India. En Djungelsaga was the first film to be shot in AgaScope (format 1:2,35), but due to its long production period, it was not the first film to be released in this format. Sucksdorff uses the wide format not just to capture lateral movement from one end of the screen to the other, but also for compositions heightening both background and foreground in different parts of the same shot.
The Flute And the Arrow took three years to finish and cost five times the budget for a "normal" Swedish movie. Some of the money was spent on the music score, conceived by Ravi Shankar, the sitar master who was to become a world celebrity ten years later.