PS Vinothraj

Biography:

P. S. Vinothraj is an Indian screenwriter and director who was born on June 18, 1988. Pebbles (Koozhangal), his first Tamil film, was written and directed by him. Pebbles was screened at the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam held in Netherlands on 4 February 2021, where it received the Tiger Award at the festival. It is the second Indian movie to take home this honor. It was selected as the Indian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, but was not nominated.

During Vinothraj’s fourth-grade year, his father passed away.He had to leave school to work as a daily wage laborer in Madurai’s flower markets. At the age of 14, he started working in one of the textile industries in Tiruppur. He spent a few years studying in a tutorial college after enrolling there. After witnessing his colleagues’ life being ruined, he ultimately made the decision to leave the area and work in movies in Chennai.

After witnessing a movie being made when he was a kid, Vinothraj became enthralled with the cinema. He was hired to work at a DVD store in Chennai. Over the course of his five years there, he spoke with a variety of film directors, assistant directors, and other movie professionals. He saw a lot of movies, particularly international ones. He ultimately began watching visually appealing movies that he could understand without subtitles because he doesn’t understand English and couldn’t grasp the subtitles in foreign languages.

Using the contacts he had while working in the DVD shop, he was hired as an assistant director for a few short films in the Nalaiya Iyakkunar TV Program. He later met Tamil filmmaker A. Sarkunam, whose works include Vaagai Sooda Vaa and Kalavani. Following that, he served as an associate director on Raghavan’s and Sarkunam’s 2013 Tamil feature film Manjapai. He felt he wanted to learn more after working on that movie, so he joined the post-modernistic theater group Manal Magudi and spent two years there as an assistant director.

During this period, Vinothraj produced the short film Subway on a very tight budget. His sister’s account of how her husband treated her served as the inspiration for Pebbles. She had to walk nearly 13 kilometers to her mother’s house after her husband tossed her out since her family was unable to pay a dowry. Learn and Teach Productions produced the movie. Vinothraj, along with his team, shot the film in around 37 days in the peak hours of sunlight during the noon as he wanted to capture the heat of the landscape.