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| Sunday, 22 May 2005 |
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Second Sri Lankan film
maker honoured at Cannes :
Vimukthi's moment Vimukthi Jayasundara will be the second Sri Lankan film maker to be honoured at the International Cannes Film Festival, this year. Vimukthi's debut feature film 'Sunlanga Enu Pinisa' (Forsaken Land), shot in Sri Lanka last year with technical specialists from France, has been selected for the 'Un Certain Regard' competition for the Camera d'Or (Golden Camera), which will be awarded for the best director of a first feature film. Un Certain Regard presented The Forsaken Land, qualifying for a Camera d'Or award. The film takes one to an indefinite and desolate post-war setting in Sri Lanka, almost in the middle of nowhere: "God is absent, but still the sun rises, over a lonely home between two trees in a forsaken land." Director Vimukthi Jayasundara talking about his intentions for this first feature film says: "If The Forsaken Land has something to do with my country's history, it is especially through its conveyance of the suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace - in between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere... For me, filmmaking is an ideal vehicle for expressing the mental stress people experience as a result of the emptiness and indecisiveness they feel in their lives. With the film, I wanted to examine emotional isolation in a world where war, peace and God have become abstract notions." Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land), is a moody, beautifully filmed movie with only a handful of characters and the rough beauty of the landscape to aid him, Jayasundara creates a portrait of a country still reeling from horrors. There is no story per se, just a series of interwoven set pieces during which little of consequence seems to happen, as men and women, having survived death, cling to life through casual sex, petty cruelties and small kindnesses. Born in 1977, Jayasekera is a writer, film critic and script writer and was trained at the Institute of the Cinema and Television of Pune, in India. He directed The Land of Silence, a documentary on the victims of the civil war and the film was selected in several festivals (Marseilles, Rotterdam, Berlin). Vimukthi Jayasundara obtained a grant in France where he studied at the School of Art of Fresnoy before becoming resident in Cinofondation of the Festival of Cannes in 2003. The 58th Cannes International Film Festival started on Wednesday May 11 and ends today (May 22), but for some of its attendees the event began in earnest three days after the opening day with the premiere of Michael Haneke's Cacho (Hidden), the first important film screened in the competition. One of the most vital film makers working today, the German-born Haneke has been at the festival seven times before, and has included his most recent films, Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher and The Time of the Wolf. All are meaty, complex works and all but The Piano Teacher, which features deviant sex and an unplugged Isabelle Huppert, received negligible attention in the United States. Also making an entry this year in Marco Tullio Giordana's competition entry Quando Sei Nato Non Puoi Pi— Nasconderti or, simply, Once You're Born. This latest film from Giordana, who wowed critics here two years ago with his television epic The Best of Youth, was one of the most highly anticipated selections of this year's program and now stands to become one of its gravest disappointments. Cacho and Once You're Born, screened the same day, make telling bookends because each involves, to varying degrees, Europe's anxiety over its rapidly changing population. Giordana takes an unfortunately didactic approach to the issue in his film, coming across like a depressed, politically liberal professor who, fully aware that the radical promise of the 1960's and the turmoil of the 70's (which consume swaths of "The Best of Youth") are long gone, hopes to guilt-trip his pampered students out of solipsism and into the world. |
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