Priyanandanan dropped out of school when he was in Class VII. His father had fallen ill and his mother’s job as a manual labourer was not enough to feed the family of five—he was the eldest and he had two younger sisters. At age 12, he began working in a small factory making tea cups in his village, Vallachira, earning Rs 2.5 a day. Then, he moved on to become assistant to the village goldsmith.

The child labourer who made the country’s best feature film of 2006 is worried by all the adulation. “My films are intensely cathartic to me and I doubt if they will ever make money. But I can’t negate myself and do some crass commercial film for my family’s sake... and after the publicity, I can no longer expect people to give me a manual job in my village anymore, either,” says Priyanandanan, 42, whose Pulijanmam won the national award announced on Tuesday.

The son of a poor village sculptor of wooden elephants (“Elephants were all that my father sculpted, all his life”), Priyanandanan discovered theatre early. “My heart was always in theatre, and I used to beg for small roles in plays staged in the village during festivals, then moved on to bigger roles. The more I came to know plays, the more I knew that there was a whole lot more to it than commercial nonsense. I started seriously reading up everything on theatre that I could get in the libraries, went around meeting the big playwrights and directors in Kerala and finally began directing plays on my own,” he says.

... contd.