On December 25, Sunday, Mollywood film director KP Sasi took his last breath. He was 64 years old at the time. KP Sasi was well-known for his role in the 1994 film ‘Ilayum Mullum’ (Leaves and Thorns).KP Sasi, who is from Thrissur in Kerala, began his career as a cartoonist while studying at JNU in the late 1970s. During the early 1980s, KP Sasi also made some experimental films with his 8mm camera.
KP Sasi, in addition to being a cartoonist and film director, has also directed several documentary films. KP Sasi’s popular documentary films include ‘A Valley Refuses to Die,’ ‘We Who Make History,’ ‘Living in Fear,’ ‘In the Name of Medicine,’ ‘Voices from a Disaster,’ and many more. VIBGYOR Film Festival was founded by KP Sasi.
KP Sasi directed ‘Ilayum Mullum,’ a 1994 film about social and psychological violence against women in Kerala. KP Sasi also directed the Bollywood film ‘Ek Alag Mausam,’ which debuted in 2003. The lead characters in the film were played by actors Nandita Das, Anupam Kher, and Renuka Shahane, with Mollywood’s ace actor Gopi appearing as a guest in ‘Ek Alag Mausam’ aka ‘A different season’.
Despite being the son of K.P. Damodaran, a founder of the Communist Party of India in Kerala, he was not interested in politics until his late teens, when he read his father’s works and was influenced by the wave of post-emergency activism. After watching Anand Patwardhan’s 1978 documentary Prisoners of Conscience, based on the emergency, and Tapan Bose’s An Indian Story, based on the Bhagalpur blinding incident, he realized that the documentary was a more powerful medium for political expression.