The crime saga revolves around the elephant poaching racket prevalent in the jungles of Kerala.
Alia Bhatt's production company, Eternal Sunshine Productions, which was announced in 2021, has backed three projects so far. Two of them feature Alia in the lead, namely Darlings and Jigra, and the third one, Poacher, has been recently announced. Poacher is the actress’ latest production and is helmed by Delhi Crime Season 1's Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta, who had bagged an Emmy in the Outstanding Drama Series category for Delhi Crime itself.
The investigative crime series is produced by Oscar-winning production company QC Entertainment. It is created, written, and directed by Richie with Alia being the Executive Producer of the series.
The trailer was launched by the team recently, and the crime saga revolves around the elephant poaching racket prevalent in the jungles of Kerala. Alia has termed the project as
“a story of one of the biggest crime rackets in India” in the caption.
The trailer kicks off by bringing attention to the Kerala forest, where an elephant is being targeted by a poaching gang. Next up, we see several investigators discuss how the poaching racket in Kerala had been silent since the 1990s, but has re-emerged now. The investigating team, led by Dibyendu Bhattacharya, consists of Nimisha Sajayan as well. Together, they aim to crack down the biggest crime racket India has seen, which amounts to around ₹1 crore crore, since it has spread across the globe. The series also features Alia's Darlings co-star Roshan Mathew.
The Amazon Original Crime series is all set to premiere on February 23.
Meanwhile, Alia Bhatt also marked her presence at a special screening of her upcoming web series Poacher in London. She was accompanied by her mother, Soni Razdan and sister Shaheen Bhatt. For the event, Alia stunned in a black velvet saree with a golden border.
As for Richie, speaking about the project, he informed news agency PTI, "I generally pick subjects according to my conscience... That's why I did Delhi Crime and that's certainly why I did Poacher. So, I'm guided by what I want to spend my time on as a human being. In this case, I wanted to spend my time with these amazing wildlife crime fighters on whom the story is based.”
He even praised the efforts of filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves, who made the documentary ‘Elephant Whisperers’ on elephant conservation. The Netflix documentary bagged an academy award in 2023 in the best documentary short film category, and got everyone’s attention in the world towards wildlife conservation.
Poacher, an eight-part crime drama based on true events, marks Richie Mehta's return to streaming space. His last OTT project was the critically-acclaimed Netflix show Delhi Crime, which was inspired by the police investigation into the 2012 gang rape of a woman in Delhi.
