In Pebbles a girl, whose family are depicted in such abject poverty that they hunt for rats to eat, is pictured momentarily euphoric as she collects helicopter seeds in her dress and then scatters them into the air. Small things would bring glimmers of joy.
While working in garment factories at 14, he enrolled into college between 6am and 10am before back-to-back shifts, realising he would need education to go into cinema. Vinothraj’s determination to make films never wavered. Temperatures got so high during the 27-day shoot that cameras began to malfunction. “I wanted to explore it in detail, the role it plays in the plight of the people.” For authenticity, he filmed during the hottest days of the year in May. “The landscape is the third main character in the film,” Vinothraj said. Tamil Nadu’s oppressive environment is omnipresent in Pebbles. Women forced to patiently scoop water from the ground and into jars as the merciless sun beats down. Women forced to get off buses in blazing heat when their babies, awoken by men aggressively coming to blows, need to be breast fed. Women forced to flee from the violent hands of husbands who drink too much. The film focuses on the small but devastating tragedies and inequalities that life in rural Tamil Nadu inflicts on women, often at the hands of men.
PS Vinothraj, the director of Pebbles, said his Tamil-language film was inspired by true events. “It was my small way of taking revenge for this humiliation of my sister.” He also chose to portray the journey through the eye of a child, the son, to inject “hope and humanity” into their journey.
“But I wanted to make it so it was the husband who had to make the walk, not the woman,” he said. It was this walk of shame, that so many women are still forced to endure, that Vinothraj wanted to capture. In a humiliating march, his sister was sent back to the family home by her new husband through the parched landscape. When his sister married a man from a neighbouring village, the family were unable to provide a dowry. It was inspired by true events as Vinothraj says, “the story chose me”. It depicts the journey of an abusive, alcoholic father and his son as they walk back home through the barren, overwhelmingly hot landscape of rural Tamil Nadu, after the father has dragged the boy out of school and taken him to a village where he wants to force his estranged wife to return home. Pebbles is, as Vinothraj describes it, a “snapshot of a life”. In a New Yorker review, Vinothraj was described as an “extraordinary observational filmmaker” whose film presents “a gendered vision of rage”. In February this year, it had won the Tiger award for best film at the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam. This month, his debut film Pebbles, a Tamil-language movie made on a shoestring budget and set in the arid landscape where he grew up, was unanimously selected as India’s entry to the Oscars. He left school, aged nine, to support his family after his father died and by 14 was working in the sweatshops of Tiruppur. Vinothraj was born into a poverty-stricken family of daily wage labourers in Tamil Nadu. The odds were stacked heavily against him. “My passion for cinema was born in that flower market.” “I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. It was, to his nine-year-old mind, intoxicating. He would put down his sacks of petals and look up in awe at the camera operators who sat atop cranes to get dramatic sweeping shots. A s a child labourer working in the flower markets of Madurai, there was nothing more exciting for PS Vinothraj than when the film crews would descend.
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