Lekhi is the director behind Tiger Legacy, a four-part wildlife documentary series now airing on Animal Planet and Discovery. The official trailer launched at the Cannes Film Market, making it one of the rare Indian natural history productions to receive that kind of international platform. The series was shot entirely inside the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra and follows more than forty individual tigers over the course of its production.
The production house behind it is Brave Age Films, which Lekhi founded with his wife Rashmi. Their previous work includes three internationally broadcast series: Bastion of the Giants, Emerald Forest: Return of the Tiger to Panna, and Wetlands. Tiger Legacy is the largest undertaking the studio has attempted.
The central subject was Maya, one of Tadoba's best-known tigresses. But as Lekhi has said in interviews, the forest had other plans. What began as a single-subject film expanded into a multi-generational story, pulling in territorial males, rival tigresses, and behavioural events that had not been captured on camera before.
One of those sequences involves a tigress named Kuhani coordinating with her near-adult cubs to take down an Indian gaur, a bison species that can weigh close to a thousand kilograms. Five tigers, one prey, a hunt that looked closer to a lion pride working the Serengeti than anything typically documented in an Indian jungle. The footage is, by most accounts, unprecedented in the genre.
What makes Brave Age Films an unusual operation is how tightly it is run. Lekhi directed, wrote, and edited all four episodes himself. Rashmi produced the series and also handled sound design and original music. The sound work has drawn attention in its own right: rather than relying on standard post-production audio, she built a soundscape that places the audience inside the forest, complete with alarm calls, insect ambience, and the particular silence that settles just before a predator moves.
The couple is already in production on a follow-up project, this one at the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve, where three tigresses have recently been translocated from central India as part of a government-led reintroduction programme. They are calling the format a docu-podcast series, combining broadcast filmmaking with interviews from the forest officials running the reintroduction on the ground. A YouTube release in full broadcast quality is also being planned, alongside the broadcast run.
For an industry that tends to celebrate film-school pedigrees and streaming deals with the usual suspects, the Lekhis are a different kind of story. Seven years in the jungle, one Cannes trailer, and a series that holds its own against international wildlife production. Sometimes the spreadsheet instinct turns out to be exactly what the forest requires.