Oceans away and years ago, the civil war in Sri Lanka separated members of Rajee Samarasinghe’s family. This touching portrait brings them together again, with the filmmaker’s signature visual flair.
A haunting collage of pomegranate arils, rural and urban landscapes, family history and mandalas undulate at a crossroads between death and longing. Inspired by the love poem Caurapacāikā by Bilhana, Lotus-Eyed Girl unfurls the impacts of colonialism on human desire with a pulsating, ambient eeriness.
In this fascinating, disorientating look at nature and technology, a Sri Lankan woman navigates a multitude of spaces – from the physical to the digital and into the virtual plane.
Collaboratively developed and enacted by impacted Tamil locals, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," infuses allegorical magic realism into an investigation of missing persons within a small community in Jaffna where memories of tortured interactions between the Tamils and the Sinhalese still linger in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war.
The Eyes of Summer was shot in the filmmaker's mother's village in southern Sri Lanka in 2010, immediately after the civil war. Together with family members, he developed an improvised story around a shy girl who becomes friends with a spirit, based on similar encounters from his mother's childhood. A story from a repressed community that doesn't seem to draw defined boundaries...