On 90th birthday

UNESCO honours Lester

The world’s most prestigious institution for culture, the UNESCO will honour the doyen of Sri Lankan cinema, Dr. Lester James Peries by screening his award winning film Gamperaliya at Salle 1 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on April 6, the 90th birthday of the great film director.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura and Sri Lanka Ambassador Lionel Fernando have extended invitations to over 150 ambassadors based in Paris, senior French bureaucrats and French and Sri Lankan film lovers for the screening jointly organised by UNESCO and the Embassy of Sri Lanka in collaboration with Heliotrope Films headed by Laurent Aleonard, who has restored the print of Gamperaliya.

Lester James Peries ranks along with Cecil B. DeMille, David Lean, Akiro Kurasawa and Satyajith Ray as greatest noblemen of world cinema. After the awarding of Silver Peacock for Gamperaliya at at the India International Film Festival in New Delhi, Cecil B. De Mel extended an invitation to Lester James Peries to Hollywood to be present at the Academy Awards, world’s highest viewed television presentation with millions of viewers. Having seen Gamperaliya, Satyajith Ray developed a close friendship with Peries. In addition to occasional meetings, they corresponded regularly as two dear friends. Peries often mentioned that he had a great respect for Director Ray.

Peries brought life into Kalasuri Martin Wicremasinghe’s Gamperaliya, a masterpiece based on the backdrop of changing village where decadent aristocracy desperately trying to hang on to rapidly losing status in a society beginning to understand the values of education and entrepreneurship.

Peries and his beloved spouse Sumithra together contributed to the upswing of Sri Lankan cinema in the last five decades. President Mahinda Rajapaksa always had a great admiration for Lester and Sumithra. It was President Rajapaksa who mooted the proposal for renaming Dickmand’s Road. as Dr. Lester James Peries Mawatha Starting with Rekawa, Lester changed the Sinhala film horizon in mid 1950s.

His film with under water photography, `Ranmuthu Duwa’ was a hit among the young and the old for three decades. The God King, the first Sri Lankan movie to be shot entirely in English, with award winning English and American actors, supported by our local talents, of royal costume drama helped Gamini Fonseka and Chandran Rathnam to enter into Hollywood landscape. Last but not the least, his film Nidhanaya ranks among the best in the world cinema and the UNESCO has recognised this by naming Lester James Peries in its `TREASURE LIST’.

At the function held to honour Lester with the Fellini Award at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris the only other recipient was the American cinema idol Clint Eastwood, both of whom are still making waves in cinematic sphere though they have passed the three quarter century mark in age.