Aashiq Abu

For over two decades, Aashiq Abu has been one of the clearest voices in Malayalam cinema — a filmmaker who helped bend an industry toward realism, and then kept bending it toward courage.

Born in Edappally, Kochi, in 1978, he learned the craft the long way: five years assisting the director Kamal, watching how films are actually made — in schedules, in compromises, in small daily acts of conviction. His own debut came with Daddy Cool (2009); two years later, Salt N' Pepper announced a director with an unmistakable feel for people. And with 22 Female Kottayam (2012) he delivered one of the defining films of the new-generation wave — fearless, female-led, and impossible to ignore.

The films that followed refused to repeat themselves: the sea-worn romance of Mayaanadhi (2017), the meticulous outbreak procedural Virus (2019), the newsroom reckoning of Naradan (2022), Neelavelicham (2023) — his tribute to Vaikom Muhammad Basheer — and the locked-room swagger of Rifle Club (2024). Across every genre, the throughline holds: exact craft in the service of conscience.

In 2012 he founded OPM Cinemas — Original Pixels in Motion — alongside Rima Kallingal, his closest collaborator. As a producer he backs first films with the same conviction he brings to his own sets: OPM's Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016), directed by debutant Dileesh Pothan, won the National Film Award for Best Malayalam Feature, and through OPM Dream Mill the studio keeps mentoring new directors, writers and technicians into the industry.

He remains, above all, a working filmmaker — director, producer, cinematographer, occasional actor — and a consistent public voice for a fairer, safer Malayalam film industry.