10 great Sri Lankan films

The UK release of the new 4k restoration of Sumitra Peries’s The Girls (Gehenu Lamai, 1978) has thrown a spotlight onto the at times turbulent world of Sri Lankan cinema. Though often eclipsed by the cinema of its giant neighbour India, Sri Lanka’s film industry has a long and eclectic history. Although there are very few records of its early period, archive material indicates the existence of several cinema halls at the turn of the 20th century. Many of these were owned by British nationals, who screened European films. They were soon overtaken by Indian and Sri Lankan entrepreneurs.

The first Sri Lankan film of which anything is known is Royal Adventure (Rajakeeya Wickremaya, 1925). Although records of the film no longer exist, it starred a future finance minister of the country and was reportedly exhibited in Singapore. It was followed by at least two more productions. Broken Promise (Kadawunu Poronduwa) was released a year before Sri Lanka gained independence, in 1947. It was the country’s first sound film.

Beginning with Lester James Peries (Rekava, 1956; Gamperaliya, 1963), independent cinema slowly took root in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Directors such as Dharmasena Pathiraja (Ahas Gawwa, 1974), Siri Gunasinghe (Sath Samudura, 1967), Vasantha Obeysekera (Palagatiyo, 1979) and Sumitra Peries tackled themes of social and political change, working outside the studio system.

The onset of a civil war between government and separatist Tamil forces in 1983 led another generation of filmmakers to tackle issues of identity and conflict. These included Prasanna Vithanage (Purahanda Kaluwara, 2001; Ira Madiyama, 2005), Asoka Handagama (Me Mage Sandai, 2000; Ini Avan, 2012) and Vimukthi Jayasundara (Sulanga Enu Pinisa, 2005). Women filmmakers such as Peries, with Sakman Maluwa (2003), and Inoka Sathyangani (Sulan Kirilli, 2000) also made waves during these difficult decades.

Today an average of 30 or so films are made and released every year in Sri Lanka. Post-war though hardly post-conflict, Sri Lanka continues to be ruptured by political change and economic crisis. Although most films are commercial and only peripherally touch on these themes, the last few years have seen a spate of popular films incorporating serious themes, ranging from urban poverty and ethnic identity to sexuality.

Director: Lester James Peries

Beginning his career as an assistant to Ralph Keene at the country’s Government Film Unit (GFU), Lester James Peries soon gained recognition as the definitive auteur of the Sri Lankan cinema. In 1956 he directed Rekava, the first Sri Lankan film shot outside a studio. Seven years later he made Gamperaliya, an adaptation of a highly renowned novel, which won Best Film at the Third International Film Festival of India in 1964.

The Treasure is generally recognised as his masterpiece and is often ranked as the quintessential Sri Lankan film. Based on a short story by one of the pioneering writers of post-independence Sri Lanka, G.B. Senanayake, Nidhanaya revolves around the confessions of an aristocrat who is obsessed with the occult. Featuring two of Sri Lanka’s finest actors, Gamini and Malini Fonseka (unrelated), the film is well regarded for its chiaroscuro lighting (cinematography by M.S. Anandan), music (by Premasiri Khemadasa), and script and dialogues (by Tissa Abeysekara). “We tried sending it to the Academy Awards twice,” Peries once recounted to me. “On both occasions, we failed.”

It was long thought to be lost, but in 2013 Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory restored the film in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. The restored version has yet to be released in Sri Lanka.

Director: D.B. Nihalsinghe

The son of a leading journalist and media figure, Diongu Badaturuge Nihalsinghe worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for a while as a cameraman before returning to Sri Lanka in the 1960s. In 1972 he was appointed as the first general manager of the newly established National Film Corporation, overseeing reforms which promoted Sri Lankan films and filmmakers through various incentives schemes.

The Desert, his second film, was the first Sri Lankan production to be shot in Cinemascope. Tightly plotted, it features Gamini Fonseka as a police cop posted in the country’s north, and Joe Abeywickrema, as a drug lord involved in the narcotics trade in the area. The cat-and-mouse game they are forced to play with each other takes on a new dimension when the cop’s wife (Swineetha Weerasinghe) discovers that they have known each other before, and that her husband is hiding a dark secret.

Loosely inspired by Cape Fear (1962), but hardly derivative, The Desert was a hit when it was first released. Unusually for a Sri Lankan film at the time, it was shot in the island’s northern province, a region that would erupt in conflict a decade later.

Director: Dharmasena Pathiraja

Radicalised by the Nouvelle Vague and the cinema of Eastern Europe, Dharmasena Pathiraja gained a reputation as an enfant terrible of Sri Lankan film. Defining his cinema in opposition to the studio system and the “bourgeois realism” of Lester James Peries, he began his career with a series of films in the 1970s that explored the travails of uprooted, unemployed youth in search of better prospects. His first and second films, Ahas Gawwa (1974) and Eya Dan Loku Lamayek (1975), explored these themes against both rural and urban settings, adding a new, politically charged layer to Sri Lankan film.

Pathiraja’s third film, Ponmani is a surprisingly incisive look at gender, caste and family in Sri Lankan Tamil society in the northern province. It is the first Tamil language Sri Lankan film to be made by a Sinhalese director. At the time Pathiraja was working as a lecturer at the University of Jaffna. Unlike Welikathara, which is dominated by Sinhalese characters, Ponmani delves into the contradictions and patterns of life that pervaded Sri Lankan Tamil society at the time. Despite its novel themes, Ponmani was barely noticed at the time of its release. Critics felt that it lacked depth and argued that the director was too distanced from the culture it depicted. Viewed today, it presents a fascinating look into a society which would engulf in unrest, uprising and bloodshed by the end of the decade.

Director: Sumitra Peries

Having started out as an assistant director to her future husband Lester (Sandesaya, 1960), Sumitra Peries soon gained a reputation as Sri Lanka’s leading editor. The Girls is her first film as director. In many ways it is also her most sincere. Made at a time of social and political change in Sri Lanka, it depicts the plight of rural Sri Lankan women caught in poverty. Sumitra’s own childhood and upbringing in a village more than 60 kilometres away from Colombo steeped her in the experiences of such women. It is this familiarity which invests the film with authenticity and, as British film critic David Robinson noted when it was shown in London, a “holistic feminine sensibility”.

The film is well regarded in Sri Lanka for its editing, its acting (especially Vasanthi Chathurani, who was only 17 when she played the protagonist Kusum), its music (the title song ‘Viyo Gee’ is a staple tune in Sri Lanka today) and its mise-en-scène. These ultimately transform the film into an overarching parable about South Asian femininity.

Director: Dharmasena Pathiraja

If Ponmani tries to distil a society on the cusp of upheaval and war in the north, Along the Road captures the lives of people caught in the middle of economic and political change in the south. In the late 1970s Sri Lanka became the first South Asian country to liberalise its economy and embark on a Thatcherite revolution: the then president J. R. Jayewardene once even invited the ‘robber barons’ of big capital to enter the country.

Pathiraja’s Along the Road traces the impact of these changes on the country and particularly its capital Colombo. The protagonist, Chandare, played by one of Sri Lanka’s most popular film stars, Vijaya Kumaratunga, is a loan shark who repossesses vehicles from those who have defaulted on mortgage payments. When his girlfriend (Indira Jonklaas) falls pregnant, the two of them hitch a ride with a friend (Vasanthi Chathurani) to find the Rs 3,000 or so that the doctor demands of them to perform an abortion.

Distinctively Nouvelle Vague in its conception and plot, Along the Road performed badly at the box-office and, like Ponmani, was barely noticed at the time. Yet it captures Pathiraja’s cinema at its finest. The last sequence, with Chandare and his girlfriend crossing the road, unsure of what the future holds, typifies Pathiraja’s bleak, unforgiving vision.

Director: Dharmasiri Bandaranayake

Before turning to filmmaking, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake made a name for himself as a playwright. In 1979 he was cast as the protagonist in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Grasshoppers (Palagetiyo), an educated but poor young man who elopes with the daughter of a rich printing press owner.

Swan Lake, which was Bandaranayake’s debut, plays on the theme at the centre of Grasshoppers between social taboos and personal relations. The film critic Regi Siriwardena lauded it as a landmark, observing that it “went further… in taking us into the world of inner psychological experience”. Tracing the obsessions of its two protagonists, Nissanka (played by Bandaranayake himself) and his girlfriend Miranda (played by one of Sri Lanka’s finest actresses, Swarna Mallawarachchi), it focuses on two families whose lives are upturned by a clandestine romance.

There is hardly a scene or sequence in Swan Lake that is not bleak or pessimistic. At certain points the narrative becomes somewhat ambivalent and unclear, including an ending which may or may not involve a murder. Bandaranayake’s fascination with psychological trauma, sexuality and loss also features in his other films, prominently Thunveni Yamaya (1983) and The Story of Suddi (Suddhilage Kathawa, 1985).

Director: Vasantha Obeyesekere

While both Along the Road and Swan Lake depict the economic and political changes of 1980s Sri Lanka, Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Dadayama projects a devastating vision of those changes and their impact on ordinary people. Based on one of the most horrific criminal cases in Sri Lankan history, involving the seduction, rape and brutal murder of a schoolgirl, Dadayama was a critical and commercial success when it first came out in 1984.

It also charted new vistas for feminist cinema in Sri Lanka. While women had previously been portrayed as submissive and passive in Sri Lankan films, Obeyesekere eschewed such stereotypes. Instead of accepting her fate, the woman, Rathmalie (Swarna Mallawarachchi), grows and hardens with her experience. As the story progresses, the intentions of her lover and rapist (Ravindra Randeniya) have become nakedly clear: he wants to abandon Rathmalie and marry a richer woman who will take him up the ladder. Obeyesekere frames this as a critique of a tumbling social order, against the backdrop of a consumerist, exploitative economic system. 

Director: Sumitra Peries

Generally regarded as her finest and most powerful work, A Letter Written on the Sand epitomises Sumitra Peries’s sympathy for women and children. Based on a short story by Simon Navagattegama, one of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated writers and dramatists, the film was shot in the sun-baked dry zone, along the country’s northwestern province. Set at the time of World War II, it recounts the torments of a woman who must fend for herself and her son after her husband, a rice cultivator, dies in a tragic accident.

Featuring a stellar performance by Swarna Mallawarachchi – generally taken as the finest in her career – A Letter Written on the Sand represents a turning point in Sumitra’s work. Unlike her other films, the story unfolds from the perspective of a male figure, the son. His attitudes to the people around him invest the entire film with a kind of innocence that is at once naive and poignant. It is through his perspective that we perceive the relationships between the main characters: the woman’s husband (H.A. Perera), her former lover, now a rich farmer (Ravindra Randeniya), and his wife, who gradually alienates and plots against her as the story progresses (Sunethra Sarachchandra).

Director: Prasanna Vithanage

The veteran actress Iranganie Serasinghe, who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and the Old Vic in the 1940s, described Joe Abeywickrema to me as “the finest character actor in Sri Lanka”. Prasanna Vithanage’s Death on a Full Moon Night features him in his most powerful performance, as a weary and stubborn old man who is convinced that his son, a soldier who died on the frontlines of the Sri Lankan government’s war against Tamil separatists, is still alive, and that the government is lying to him.

When Death on a Full Moon Night was released, the army was losing large numbers to the war. For this reason, the government banned Vithanage’s film, which depicts the horrors of the conflict from the perspective of the families of dead soldiers. Though it was later overturned, the ban raised a fiery political storm. 

Poignant from beginning to end, Vithanage’s film exposes the travails of villagers who are pushed into the thick of war and are forced to undergo bureaucratic hurdles to deliver final rites to their loved ones. A subplot involving a local government officer (Mahendra Perera) shows that, even in times of war and unmitigated tragedy, human beings are not above looking for gain and profit. The final scene of Abeywickrema’s character looking contemplatively at the camera by a river, a smile radiating across his face, is one of the most recognisable in Sri Lankan cinema.

Director: Visakesa Chandrasekaram

Although many films have been produced about the Sri Lankan war between the government and Tamil separatist forces, very few have been made about the JVP insurrection (1987 to 1989), another dark chapter in the country’s history, which unfolded between the government and leftwing rebels in and across the southern province. Estimates put the death toll of the insurrection at more than 100,000.

Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s Paangshu takes place years after the rebellion. Nita Fernando plays Baba Nona, an elderly woman whose son is captured, interrogated and tortured by government forces in the 1980s. Much of the story takes place in a courthouse where she encounters the suspect, a retired army soldier. As Baba Nona reflects on the past, she remembers her son’s immersion into radical politics. Forgiveness and redemption run across the film, and although the director does not allow the story to deteriorate into a predictable, happy finale, it ends with the woman achieving some peace with her son’s killer and her own past.

The Girls is back in cinemas from 10 July.