The Road to Jaffna

‘What makes anyone want to blow themselves up for a cause? In this intimate and personal portrait, we join two teenage girls, Dharsika and Pahalchudar, whose families have been torn apart through war. They join a militant faction of Tamil Separatists, The Black Tigers, and for seven years the young women train and fight side-by-side, firm in the belief of the righteousness of their cause and the ultimate mission. Beate Arnestad is one of the first foreign filmmakers to be allowed to document the group of Tamil separatists fighting for independence. Arnestad’s provocative and insightful look at these elite all female regiments, delves into the daily lives and preparations of the women and gives us an insight into the driving power of fundamentalism. My Daughter the Terrorist is a timely look at life inside a guerrilla organisation, and the way the world appears to a terrorist. It is a film about unthinkable terrorist acts – and about getting to know and to some extent understand those who are firmly committed to doing the unthinkable.’ New Zealand Documentary Film Festival

‘The horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war are the context for this understated film. A Tamil woman meets a deserter from the Sri Lankan army. Mistaking his brief interest in her for a greater commitment, she follows him back to his village. His own return is greeted with consternation as the army comes searching for him. The villagers are mixed about protecting him. But the arrival of the beautiful young Tamil woman causes enormous ructions in the village, where he already has a long-term girlfriend whom he is expected to marry. He tries to rid himself of the Tamil, but she shows unexpected devotion and determination to remain with him. The director, Asoka Handagama, who wrote the screenplay and the novel on which the film was based, points to the simplicity of his shooting style — static camera with no zooms, pans, tracking, fade-ins, or fade-outs — as the most honest and effective method of describing the angst of people at war.’ Anne Démy-Geroe, St.George Bank Brisbane International Film Festival

‘[The Forsaken Land] seeks to convey that suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace. In between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere, in the manner of a poem where images can replace words.’ Vimukthi Jayasundara

‘A stark landscape that often seems to be frozen in time. A group of human beings, set against this landscape, struggling to retain a sense of humanity, to build and sustain human relationships, all of them caught up in the cycle of life and death that exists on the fringes of a war.  A narrative that walks a tightrope between despair and delusion on one side and hope and aspiration on the other. Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land maps the dreams and hallucinations of these characters, leading us through the morass of life in war-time, with its anxieties and uncertainties; it’s opening up of avenues for realising your desires as well as for articulating destruction of the self, and self-destruction. The Forsaken Land is a study of the vagaries of war, of the ways in which war shapes the lives and futures of women, men and children. The film is a study of human alienation, and of desperate attempts to escape that alienation. It is almost a meditation on life. At the same time, The Forsaken Land is a film about the dehumanising brutality of life in contemporary Sri Lanka, a film that lays bare the grim realities of an island where each day the list of those who have disappeared, been abducted and murdered by the bullet of an unknown assassin grows longer.’ Sunila Abeysekera

‘In Between Two Worlds, the forces of history, of the past, the forces of nature, the forces of each character, the forces of the institutional powers, the forces of cinema, all come to a clash and to explode. All these forces flow through time, come from the past, reappear in the present and are tensed into the future.’  Vimukthi Jayasundara

‘Sri Lanka's civil conflict raged so furiously for twenty-six long years that when it was declared over, one of the main reactions was numb disbelief. Director Vimukthi Jayasundara last explored the hollow absurdities of his homeland's war in The Forsaken Land. Four years later, the fighting has stopped but the stark symbols of war are not so easily erased. Because Jayasundara is at heart a symbolist, Between Two Worlds never sets out to explain the conflict, but it does illuminate it. Aman washes up on the shore and makes his way into a rioting city. He rescues a foreign woman, and they begin travelling out to the hills. But instead of refuge, the countryside reveals increasing menace. What begins as enigmatic soon moves to unsettling, then descends into the stark stabs of violence particular to civil war. Jayasundara is always alive to the unique nature of his setting. Shooting in widescreen compositions that show off the area's lush green vistas to sublime effect, he conjures up images that haunt this beauty – military helicopters sweeping over the landscape, a dog feasting on a cow. Here he expands and deepens the absurdist quality he brought to The Forsaken Land. Our protagonist witnesses a van plunge madly into a lake, but when he arrives at the shore, an old man swimming there insists the incident is ancient history. “It's possible you just saw something that happened a long time ago,” he says. Jayasundara's Sri Lanka is a mythic place where war has collapsed the space between past and present, has militarised traditional rituals and, perhaps worst of all, has made the mute witnessing of horror an everyday act. What elevates his filmmaking from commentary to art is the sophistication of his symbolism and his fluid, graceful articulation of pain.’ Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival

‘The Land of Silence is a documentary, but at the same time, it feels like fiction. The film is set in a hospital full of disabled young people. What struck me was that in a way, time had stopped: it was no longer possible for them to undo what had been done... War has faces, just like a coin: on one side are the dead and the maimed but on the other, intact desires.’ Vimukthi Jayasundara

‘Made with cinematographic equipment from the 1960s and interspersed with occasional dialogues deliberately not translated but relayed by a background commentary, the film transforms images of the present into ghostly archives. It refuses to intensify the horror by making it appear close at hand, and denounces the alliance between technological virtuosity and fascination with war. Rather, it has faith in “history as a source of knowledge” to counteract silence.’ International Film Festival Rotterdam

‘In Search of a Road is both a documentary of history and hope. The film shows a road that has been jammed with conflict and misunderstanding. But it is also a road that carries the memory of peace and community. In Search of a Road is a prime example of cinema's ability to make connections and to bring people together’. Philip Cheah, Singapore International Film Festival

‘[In Search of a Road] takes as its main motifs the northern railway line in Sri Lanka and the A9 highway, the two main links running parallel to each other from North to the South. The railway line and the A9 narrate the story of war and peace, of travel, mobility, place and displacement in this road movie turned documentary on the history of the Sri Lankan state and the ethnic conflict. The story unfolds even as its people embark on a long journey on August 1, 1905 through place, land, territory, war and peace, home and state into the land of the unknown, to a no-man's land. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, the film takes us on a 100-year journey through history and memory in to the future.’ Susitha R Fernando

‘The land is stricken by drought and ethnic conflict. The lake on the edge of the jungle is almost dry and a few miles away the sons of the rural poor are dying on the front of a bitter civil war. As he collects water from what is left in the lake, Wannihami, the blind old man, knows the rain will come soon. A few days later, on the Buddhist holiday of the full moon, his son's body is returned by the Army in a sealed coffin. Wannihami refuses to sign the papers which will entitle the family to the Government's compensation payment for his son's death in action. Faced with this pressure from people blinded by desperate poverty and day to day hardships, Wannihami retains the clarity of vision, which gives him the wisdom that reaches far beyond what the eye can see. He receives permission to dig up and open his son's sealed coffin. By doing this he knows he will invalidate the compensation claim, but his greater purpose is to believe that the war cannot kill his son.’ Prasanna Vithanage

‘For the impoverished villagers of Prasanna Vithanage's Death on a Full Moon Day, the civil war is an abstraction, a distant reality removed from the struggles of everyday life. Vithanage incisively parallels religious themes of cycle, enlightenment, and renewal within the context of endemic poverty in order to expose the dysfunctional institutions that help perpetuate the inhumanity of the protracted civil war… Framed against Wannihami's defiance, the breaking of the coffin’s seal is a humble act of enlightenment — a search for truth in the face of isolation, adversity, and dispossession.’ Strictly Film School

‘August Sun revolves around three narratives which unfold simultaneously. During two scorching days in August, three different groups of people face different experiences due to circumstances beyond their control. These are ordinary people thrown into the heat of war. The experiences they encounter may not be directly related to the conflict. These events, like the weather, govern their lives. An eleven year old Muslim boy, Arfath, is struggling to keep his companion and friend, a dog, while the family is forced out of their home by the rebels. Chamari, a young woman is looking for her husband who is a soldier missing in action. A young soldier Duminda walks into a brothel to find his sister among the working girls.’ Prasanna Vithanage

‘The events in August Sun take place on the day Sri Lanka became world champions when they beat Australia in the 1996 Cricket World Cup final in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also the period immediately following the breakdown of the first attempt at peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). So it was a time of great tension and uncertainty mixed with elation at the cricketing success.’ Robert Crusz, Cinemaya