‘Whispers Of The Mountains’ review: Balanced drama explores cost of mining in northwest India

Dir/scr: Jigar Nagda. India. 2025. 90mins

In mountainous Udaipur, one of the world’s most arid regions, a preteen boy plants a tree and nurtures it with precious water from the town well; an act of subtle defiance in Jigar Nagda’s spare and quietly agitating Whispers Of The Mountains, which makes its debut in Goa’s Indian Panorama. Inspired by the devastation Nagda saw when he returned to his ancestral home for COVID lockdown, the film casts a scathing but understanding eye on the ecologically destructive mining practices of northwest India’s Aravali Range.

Nagda’s commitment to human and environmental storytelling remains foregrounded

Nagda does not attempt to offer any solutions to the problems highlighted by the film – chiefly how to balance conservation with economic stability for families that now rely on large scale mining. Instead, it emerges as a thought-provoking drama that is specific to India but universal in its exploration of a double-edged sword issue.

Whispers Of The Mountains is very much of a thematic piece with Nagda’s first films, short documentary Aravali: The Lost Mountains (2022) – about the impact of mining and arguably a foundation for this extended narrative – and his first feature, A Boy Who Dreamt Of Electricity (2024), about a man whose marriage plans fall by the wayside when he opts to install solar panels on his home. Though his latest work demonstrates a significant artistic leap, Nagda’s commitment to human and environmental storytelling remains foregrounded. That should guarantee it attention from festivals focused on environmentalism, sustainability and human rights, but its technical finesse and timely subject matter could generate interest beyond niche events.

Whispers is almost bookended by images of 12-year-old Raghu (Rajveer Rao) sitting on a stone wall overlooking his home in Udaipur’s Aravali region. The first scene has Raghu facing the crane-dotted cavernous opening to a marble mine; in the second he faces the scrubby landscape beyond the wall. Raghu is mute, and he heads home from school one afternoon with news that he’s been offered a scholarship at a school in the city for kids with learning needs. Yet his widower father Tilak (Harshant Sharma) forbids him to go, telling Raghu he needs him to stay and help with the tea stall he runs, one that largely subsists on servicing the nearby mines.

Wisely, Nagda doesn’t paint Tilak as a selfish monster intentionally holding his son back from an education. He’s a pragmatist, and a bit lonely, which also sends him to marriage broker Rakesh (Kunal Mehta) to help him find a second wife after four years alone. He has ambitions to provide a better home for Raghu, one made of bricks and mortar, that he expects to build with the proceeds from the sale of a land parcel he owns. Tilak’s best laid plans crumble, however, when he falls ill with lung disease, the direct result of the mining dust he breathes in every day.

The tension between the need to earn a living and pillaging the already blighted land gives the film its narrative thrust, even as writer-director-producer-co-star Nagda (he plays the mine manager) keeps his story lean, That allows cinematographer Burhan Habsee free rein to allow the saturated yet natural compositions to do a great deal of the heavy lifting. Shot in Rajasthan, Udaipur and Kheeda among others, the visuals toggle between a warm earthiness in Tilak and Raghu’s mud home and a glaring, ugly starkness in the mine – despite the fact it produces aspirational counter tops. Roberto David Evlagon’s ghostly score is complemented by Nilay Bhivgade’s sound design, together creating a haunting soundscape that evokes Rajasthan’s bleak beauty as well as the intrusive thrum of industry that is causing such devastation.

Anchored by young Rao’s tremendously empathetic, and silent, performance as Raghu, who shifts between physical resignation and rebelliousness on a dime, Nagda manages to render Whispers Of The Mountains simultaneously low-key and on-the-nose; a screed as well as a plea.