By the time Lijo Pellissery was born, Jose Pellissery who co-owned a theater group by Sarathy Theatres, was active in Malayalam films and this gave the young Lijo an early grounding in films. His career started as an assistant to Manoj Pillai, an ad filmmaker, and Pellissery soon started making short films of his own. One of his films, 3, was one of three films shortlisted for the best film award at the PIX Short Film Festival 2007. He debuted as a feature film director in 2010 with Nayakan, which narrated the story of a Kathakali artist who joined the underworld to take revenge on those who killed his family. Though the film was critically acclaimed, it failed at the box office. His next venture, City of God, one of the early New Generation films of Malayalam cinema and a multi-starrer featuring Indrajith Sukumaran, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Parvathy, Swetha Menon and Rima Kallingal used hyperlink cinema as its narrative structure and was a critical success but, again failed miserably at the box office; it was pulled from cinemas just days after its release. It took another two years before he came up with his third movie, Amen, in 2013, which had Indrajith Sukumaran, Fahad Fasil, Swathi Reddy and Kalabhavan Mani in the lead roles and the movie succeeded at the box office while drawing good critical response. After a gap of almost two years, Pellissery released his fourth film, Double Barrel, a comic thriller, with Prithviraj Sukumaran, Indrajith Sukumaran, Arya, Sunny Wayne and Asif Ali in the lead roles. However, the film did not succeed critically or commercially. The next project, Angamaly Diaries, a black comedy cloaked in a gangster plot that revolves around the locale of Angamaly, was scripted by popular actor, Chemban Vinod Jose. The film, made on a small budget of million, was received well at the box office and drew critical acclaim; Anurag Kashyap opined that Angamaly Diaries was his film of the year. Ee.Ma.Yau, his next film based on a satire written by P. F. Mathews and with his regular composer, Prashant Pillai, scoring the music, was premiered on November 30, 2017 but the release was delayed due to undisclosed reasons. Before it was released on May 4, 2018, the film received the Kerala State Film Award for Best Director at the 48th Kerala State Film Awards. The film also won him the Silver Peacock Award for the best director at the 49th International Film Festival of India, 2018, which was held in Goa in November 2018 followed by the Sinema Zetu International Film Festival Award for Best Direction.
Influences and style of film making
A fan of film makers such as K. G. George, Padmarajan, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola, Pellissery often uses non-linear style of narrative. His early films had established actors in the lead roles but Angamaly Diaries marked a change where almost the entire cast were newcomers with 86 new actors making their debut, and subsequently accomplishing a triumph in the form of a 11-minute uninterrupted long take in the climax.
