Kalu Sewanella:

Ghosts on small screen

by Husna Inayathullah

Ghost stories are interesting and exciting. Everyone enjoys watching them. Ghosts usually give us a feeling of the supernatural.

While ghost stories are often explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes from comedy to morality tales.

Ghosts often appear in the narrative as sentinels or prophets of things to come. The belief in ghosts is found in all cultures around the world.

Sandra Vinodini Hapuarachchi who has been living in England for the past 30 years has returned to Sri Lanka. She has produced her first teledrama Kalu Sewanella. It is a ghost story.

It will be on the small screen shortly.

In an interview with Montage, Hapuarachchi speaks about her maiden teledrama.

Excerpts:

Question: How did you take to the teledrama industry?

Answer: I always wanted to produce a teledrama from my childhood. I got married to a doctor 30 years ago and went to England with my husband.

I studied Kandyan dancing. Then I entered Harvard University, The United States in 1989. However I could not complete the course anyway.

I could not do what I wanted from my childhood. I wanted to achieve something in the arts field. I used to write scripts and lyrics as a hobby.

Q: Can you tell something about your teledrama?

A: Kalu Sewanella is based on a 100- year-old Scottish mystery. The teledrama is directed by Diluka Prasad Gunetilake.

The script was also written by him. He completed the shooting of the teledrama in a month. The costumes were designed by me.

Kalu Sewanella was shot in Nuwara Eliya because of its ideal climate and the environment that were similar to those of Scotland.

The story begins in Dermsten with a murder.

The story shows how the soul of the body takes revenge.

The soul of a young girl of 25 suffers a lot from pain and anger. She wants to take revenge from her boyfriend who murdered her.

There is a series of mysterious deaths taking place in the village. A detective tries to find out the reason behind the mysterious deaths of young girls in the village.

We used a lot of new techniques. Some of them are animated trains, a wide angle camera with visual effects and a background depicting Scotland 100 years ago. For instance, the detectives travel in horse carriages filled with lanterns.

Q: Are you planning to produce any other teledrama in the future?

A: My next teledrama will have Bollywood actors.