(Bombay) As a little boy, he was selling flowers in a market in his hometown in southern India, when cameramen and actors arrived for a movie shoot. This was the trigger for PS Vinothraj whose first film is currently in the running for an Oscar.
More than two decades have passed, his film Koozhangal just caused a sensation in India, but also abroad under the title Pebbles including in Hollywood where he is competing for the Oscar for best international feature film next year.
However, the young 32-year-old filmmaker did not expect such recognition and especially wanted to organize screenings of Pebbles in the villages of the southern state of Tamil Nadu where he filmed it.
Coming from a disadvantaged background, he was inspired by the tragedies that occurred within his own family and his environment, in the old city of Madurai.
“Telling these torments”
“This kind of life has turned into a movie,” he told AFP, speaking in Tamil.
Aged 9 when his father died, he immediately had to go to work, deprived of an education to help his family.
“The cinema allows me to talk about my pain,” he confides.
He grew up living on odd jobs that took him elsewhere. He was once a worker in a textile factory in Tiruppur. “Many lives have crumbled before my eyes,” he says.
“Some got married very young, went through a multitude of trials”, he continues, “all of this stuck with me, with the desire to tell about these torments”.
The dream of becoming a director persisted and, convinced that education would help make it a reality, he wanted to enroll in a school. But he had missed the boat because “too old”.
He then moved to the state capital, Chennai (former Madras), where he trained alone in cinema watching films in the DVD store that employed him.
Then he ended up getting assistant positions on short film shoots and in the theater.
“My real life experience taught me how to be tough and helped me make this movie. […], prepared me for it, ”he assures us.
“Simple, honest stories”
PS Vinothraj was thinking about what he wanted to tell in the cinema, looking for an idea for a feature film when his sister crossed the threshold of the family house, in tears, he recalls.
She had been kicked out of the marital home by her husband and had reached this point after having walked 13 kilometers, her 2-year-old child in her arms, under a blazing sun.
“I felt pain and wondered why real life was such an ordeal”, he said again, “then I realized that I was working in the cinema, it was my tool”.
Thereby, Pebbles tells the story of an alcoholic, violent man and his young son, in the harshness and aridity of Tamil Nadu, in search of the mother who left them.
The title comes from a Tamil word for pebbles that peasants put in their mouths to fight thirst.
Indian critics applauded a ‘masterpiece’ and hailed a ‘sensational debut […] visceral and powerful ”.
At the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Pebbles was awarded a Tiger Award, with the jury deeming the beginner’s “seemingly simple and humble” art to be a “lesson in pure cinema”.
He said “very proud” of his selection at the Oscars, adding that such support has the effect of “a big party”.
PS Vinothraj joins the emerging movement of Tamil directors, like him, from disadvantaged backgrounds, who dare to deal with social inequalities and stage characters battered by life.
“I do not speak English, am not educated, I learned everything on the road to existence”, he explains, “the film is the metaphor”.
His next project found material in another family situation. The main thing for him, he assures, is to continue to shoot “simple, honest stories of life”.