Internationally Sucksdorff is best known for his short city symphony on Stockholm, Människor i stad (1947), which is something of an irony since he really is the great renderer of nature and wildlife, making more than a dozen shorts on this subject in the 1940s and 50s. In 1953, the same year Sucksdorff made his first feature-length documentary on Swedish wildlife, Det stora äventyret, he travelled to India to shoot the ten-minute Vinden och floden, arguably his most beautiful short.

Like Renoir before him and Rossellini after him, Sucksdorff was fascinated by India, and he returned a couple of years later for the production of En Djungelsaga, 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 2.35:1), but due to its long production period (shooting alone took 18 months) it was not the first film to be released in this format. It is, however, the best Scope film ever made in Sweden, and 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. En Djungelsaga is also a stunningly beautiful colour film.

The film is narrated in Swedish (displaying a kind of exoticism), and the local dialogue was never subtitled in any release version. The Swedish release version included an explanatory voice-over (narrated by Sucksdorff himself) at the very beginning of the film, which was missing from the sound negative, so a new sound negative for this section was made from existing prints in the collection.

Jon Wengström, Cinemateket–Svenska Filminstitutet