12 highlights
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There’s a new star in Indian cinema
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And last week, he established himself as a major director on the national scene, with his 2019 movie, Jallikattu, selected as India’s official entry to the Oscars.
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Pellissery’s first brush with visual storytelling was when he went with his father, Chalakkudy-based drama and movie artist Jose Pellissery, for drama sessions.
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In 2007, one of the short films, 3, caught the eye of a prominent Malayalam actor, Indrajith Sukumaran, who, along with his brother, the film industry titan Prithviraj, became one of Pellissery’s early cheerleaders. Indrajith offered to act in a film Pellissery liked, scripted by writer P.S. Rafeeq, about a Kathakali artist moonlighting to rough up bad guys.
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Amen in 2013 was more broad-based—a musical satire, full of romance, dance and colour. It became one of the most talked-about movies of the year, praised for its fantastical themes and visual grammar. The inspiration from western cinema did not go unnoticed by Kerala’s film lovers, who have organised India’s biggest international film festivals by attendance for nearly three decades.
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The critics’ main gripe is that he draws from everybody—American legend Stanley Kubrick to Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica—without working on the content. Malayalam film commentator Roby Kurian argues in his latest YouTube video that Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, which won two awards at the Venice International Film Festival, and has the backing of Hollywood titan Alfonso Cuarón, would have been a better pick for the Oscars.
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A person close to the director, who requested that I do not name him, recounts this anecdote: Soon after the disaster of Double Barrel, Pellissery narrated a script to Mohanlal. The star heard him out and then said no. Pellissery protested: “Why did you spend so much time if you were not interested?” The actor replied, “I wanted to know how you would end this story.”
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Around this time, he was introduced by a friend to Maoist, a short story about a village going berserk while trying to catch a buffalo that escapes from a butcher’s shop. He got in touch with the author S. Hareesh (who won this year’s JCB Prize for his debut novel in translation, Moustache) and developed a script which became Jallikattu.
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He is known for being a terror on the set, and he will keep changing his plans. But once you see the final product, it is all forgotten, as it will be fantastic,” says Hareesh, recounting the two years that went behind making the movie.
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Getting the buffalo right for the film took three months. “He didn’t want VFX (visual effects), unless we could afford In the Heart of the Sea kind of VFX, which was financially impossible. Finally, we bought a buffalo, and got craftsmen from Chennai to make three models. They pasted a real buffalo’s skin on the replicas,” says Pappachan.
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While he was waiting to get the buffalo right, Pellissery made Ee Ma Yau in 2018. Shot in 17 days, the film was described as “a laugh-out-loud, yet deep, meditation on death and faith that’s a masterclass in writing,” by critic Baradwaj Rangan.
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“It was all very difficult. The idea was to get a person inside the replica and do the live-action sequences. The man who played the buffalo (Tanu Kottiyam) needed a month of Ayurveda treatment for injuries after the shoot,” says Pappachan.