KOCHI: Engineers might not be very new to Mollywood, with the industry recently witnessing a flood of techies as actors and directors. Interestingly, about 50 per cent of them have been able to make a mark, while academically-trained filmmakers are still struggling to achieve success.
Sajith Kumar C D, working as a mechanical engineer at Qatar, is yet another person who has joined the league. The 44-year-old director from Kozhikode is currently venturing into tinsel town through short films. His first work is a 12-minute short film named Machines. “Cinema has been a passion from my academic days in NSS Engineering College Palakkad. I believe the time is right for me to take up the new venture,” says Sajith.
The short film Machines with the tagline ‘I see a man in every machine and a machine in every man’ has been completely shot in Qatar. The film portrays the journey of a man who dedicates his life entirely to development of machines and ends up in a phase where he loses his greenness and ends up in a graveyard of scrapped machines.
The film has been produced through public funding under the banner of Campus Oaks. “Campus Oaks consists of a group of engineers who passed out from NSS Engineering College, Palakkad. Each member of the group was active in ‘Campus Theatre’, which has staged around 25 plays,” Sajith says.
A K Biju Raj has done the camera work for the film, which was edited by Rafeeq Nhamanghat. Mohammad Gasnafar is the production designer, while Davis Antony designed the sound track of the movie. The music is by Jinson. Prashant S Pillai and Mani Ayyancheri play the protagonists in the film, which has been screened at the BSSF-15 Short Film Festival at Bengaluru.
Sajith Kumar is also planning a feature film. The title of the film is ‘Fragrance’. “I am not interested in an out-and-out commercial film. I am inclined to do films which fall under the umbrella of ‘good art’. Fragrance will be a 90-minute film and is currently under pre-production. Tamil actor Nasser will play the lead role and the rest of the cast will be decided soon,” he says.
According to Sajith, the new trend of screening films like CR no: 89 and Asthamayam Vare in packed theatres has paved the way for making such films.