National Film Awards | Midhun Murali On Winning Best Editor For Just His Second Film 'Pookkaalam'

It was only on Monday that Midhun Murali felt he was back to reality. Ever since he won the National Film Award for his work as editor in Pookkaalam, he’s been in a daze, replying to messages and accepting one too many congratulatory calls. He says he did not expect the award in the least.

When he saw news of the awards being announced on Saturday, that too on X, he made a mental note to check it out on YouTube, but only because he had hoped that the film’s lead Vijayaraghavan would win the award for Best Actor (he won for Best Supporting Actor instead).

As for Midhun, his National Award for editing, was entirely a surprise. What’s even more interesting is that he’s won this award after having edited just two films: Pookkaalam and Kalamandalam Hyderali (2020).

But naturally, the journey wasn’t as easy as that sounds. Inspired by the Tamil short film wave that inspired the birth of filmmakers such as Karthik Subbaraj and Nalan Kumarasamy, Midhun began to direct and work on short films in early 2010. By 2011, he had made Shey, among the first short films to go viral on YouTube. He had co-directed the film too, but the limitations of a short film forced him to take up the duties of an editor as well. Armed only with him experience of chopping up and then combining different songs into one medley, this former dancer decided give editing a try, “very obviously with a downloaded pirated copy of Final Cut Pro.”

Despite the virality, he did not see himself as a director. “In the very least, I’d hoped to be an editor-director.” He moved to Mumbai to study editing and then after facing stiff completion, he moved down to Chennai to assist editor Anthony. “He was a superstar among editors…the way he cut songs got me to notice edits. Especially his work in 'Loosu Penne’ from Vallavan.”

During this time, he kept shuffling between his hometown of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala and Chennai, and somewhere along the way, he became a coveted editor for short films with several movie hopefuls coming to him with requests.

This is when he met folks like Basil Joseph, Ganesh Raj, Anand C Chandran, Abhinav Sunder Nayak, who would all come to dominate in the field years later. “There was always talk of a film that was just about to begin. But it kept getting delayed and then COVID-19 happened. It’s not that I was being choosy; I was just waiting for one of my buddies to make their film.”

That’s what happened with Pookkaalam, directed by Ganesh Raj. He recalls the first phone call too in which Ganesh had described the idea, way back in 2019. The family drama, about a 90-year-old man’s fight for divorce after 60 years of marriage, was first written as a straightforward linear narrative. But with each new draft, the film too underwent many changes until the present edit in which the narrative keep switching back to flashbacks, as it tries to chart the old man Ittoop’s journey to becoming a divorcee.

“The first rough cut was close to three hours long. Then we brought it down to two hours and 40 minutes. We sat it on again to further bring it down to the final two-hour 16-minute version.”

The challenge was the different timelines and the number of characters that made up the film. As a family drama tracing the lives of multiple generations, it was first written into a screenplay with as many “120 scenes when the usual film ends with 80 to 90. The biggest challenge was to bring most of those 120 scenes into a short runtime, without ruining the essence.”

Scenes were trimmed and in other cases, multiple scenes were combined to form on elegant montage, “a result of being a part of script narrations, right from the beginning.”

What helped was Ganesh’s vision for the film. “He wanted to give the film a Wes Anderson-esque feel to the film. Even the paint on the walls or the patterns on the flooring was planned much in advance.”

By the time they released the film, they were reasonably happy what they’d made. “But when the audiences didn’t accept the film theatres, we were all naturally, very heartbroken. And as editor, there’s a special guilt and responsibility we feel when a film doesn’t do well. Perhaps I could have done more.. worked harder.”

But it was when the film hit OTTs that the film found its real audience. In 2023, there was still a lot of hesitation to come to theatres and a film like Pookkaalam was best imagined to be watched on OTT. “But when it released, it got a lot of love especially from outside of Kerala.”

It took two more years and the National Film Award for the film to finally get its due. After all the love that went in to its making, he feels the win was deservedly actor Vijayaraghavan’s. “Even when I was struggling to bring down the runtime, my guilt was linked to chopping out his amazing performance. I felt heartless at times to be removing genuinely heartfelt moments from the film, but now it feels justified and worth it.”

He’s also grateful that these laurels have arrived at time when even the most basic content creator has some idea about editing and the work that goes into. “As editors, we need to thank Reels and TikTok. Everyone edits videos these days. Unlike earlier when people thought it was easy work, now there’s genuine appreciation for transitions and effects. When I watch Reels, we are all amazed at some of the ideas and how they’re able to pull it all off: we all need to keep learning and we’re all trying to fight the same enemy…reducing attention span.”