It may seem odd to hear one of the top Sri Lankan filmmakers of all time claim that cinema, as we know it, is dead.
"If you look at the process of filmmaking, there was a mystery involved. These days, a lot of the process is digital and films are made specifically for television. There used to be a separation between the two mediums. That is why I feel that cinema is kind of dead," explained Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara, who is in the city as a jury member for the Pune International Film Festival (PIFF), in a chat with TOI. His work, in fact, was also part of a global anthology of short films by many directors, which demonstrated that cinema is on its death march.
Jayasundara's India connections are far and wide, having been a student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) — "people there have a good sense of cinema" — and he remains the only Sri Lankan director to have made an Indian film, the Paoli Dam-starrer Bengali film Chhatrak.
The film ran into trouble with the Censor Board over nudity in a scene, which ensured that the subject of the film, that of exploited foreign workers in the Middle East, was largely overlooked.
"The entire controversy was unfortunate. In the film, I wanted to acknowledge the value of humanity, something you find when you read (Rabindranath) Tagore's poetry. I also made the film from a global perspective, without any filters and I wanted to pay tribute to the migrants' contribution to society. But the idea was never to make the film controversial in any way," Jayasundara asserted.
His work first came to global attention in 2002 when he made a short film about the then-raging Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgency, which had ravaged entire parts of the country. To this day, politics in Sri Lanka is largely divided along ethnic lines, with very little reconciliation efforts having taken place, Jayasundara said. (TNN)