Documentary filmmaker Okay.P. Sasi passes away

Documentary filmmaker Okay.P.Sasi, who used his craft to spotlight individuals’s struggles throughout the nation over the previous 4 a long time, handed away in Thrissur on December 25. He was 64.

One of many earliest to undertake documentary filmmaking within the nation, and a scathing critic of the event mannequin being adopted by the Indian state, he has given a voice to the oppressed from Narmada valley to Kashipur.

Although he’s the son of Okay.P. Damodaran, one of many founders of the Communist Get together of India in Kerala, he was not swayed by politics till his late teenagers when he learn his father’s works and was influenced by the wave of post-emergency activism. Beginning out as a cartoonist, he realised that documentary was a extra highly effective medium for political expression after watching Anand Patwardhan’s 1978 documentary Prisoners of Conscience, based mostly on the emergency and Tapan Bose’s An Indian story based mostly on the Bhagalpur blinding incident.

His grounding in cartooning meant that satire was one of many fundamental instruments in his movies. The biting sarcasm in his music video ‘America America’ in protest towards the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (which based on him offended Indian People than Native People) is testimony to that.

“Documentary activists use a whole lot of ache and anger. Satire is extra highly effective and can’t be confronted simply. It’s but to be correctly explored as a medium of political activism,” Sasi instructed The Hindu in an interview in 2012.

Over time, he has documented Manipuri individuals’s battle towards AFSPA ( Redefining peace), problems with water privatisation (Supply of life on the market), displacement of tribals in Odisha ( Improvement at gun level), Narmada problem ( A valley refuses to die), local weather change and plenty of different pertinent problems with our time. His music video Gaon Chodab Nahin grew to become one of many anthems of defiance for the natives of Kashipur of their battle towards the mining giants.

His function movies have been additionally constructed round pertinent points with Ilayum Mullum turning into a doc on the on a regular basis violence confronted by girls and Ek Alag Mausam highlighting the travails of these affected by HIV AIDS.

For him, documentary film-making was about finding out a difficulty, clarifying questions and telling the reality to the world, one thing which he had discovered more and more laborious to do with the rising bills in a ‘growth-oriented’ economic system. He made his first movie at Rs. 2000, an abysmally low sum unimaginable in in the present day’s circumstances, however he continued to soldier on together with his digicam, even underneath attempting circumstances. 

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