The Forsaken Land

Vimukthi Jayasundara is an award-winning Sri Lankan film director, screenwriter and visual artist. His first feature, The Forsaken Land (2005) won the Caméra d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, making him the only Sri Lankan to win the award. He followed this with Between Two Worlds (2009) which got nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival 2009. Vimukthi’s third feature, Mushrooms (2011) was filmed in India and went on to be selected for the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival 2011. In 2012, the Jeonju International Film Festival invited him as one of three international film directors to produce a film for the Jeonju Digital Project 2012 for which he made Light in Yellow Breathing Space.

His father was a Science Teacher and Vimukthi’s early move to Galle was a result of his parents temporarily separating, thereby forcing him to live with his grandmother. But a wave of ethnic unrest, destruction, bloodshed and chaos shrouded the country in darkness. Starting with the Black July Massacre in ’83 and going up to the JVP Insurrection in ’89, the entire country descended into pandemonium and this disrupted daily life the island-over.

The riots were especially prominent in Galle, being a Southern JVP stronghold and to get away from the violence, Vimukthi would escape into the tranquillity of the forests and wander around by himself. And when not doing that, he would hold up in the house and passionately delve into books. This passage of time was the anvil on which many elements we see in his films were forged.

Reading led him to thinking and this led to an insatiable interest in media. To quench this thirst, Vimukthi journeyed to Colombo every weekend, to attend a class for a Diploma in Journalism, which was the only one of its kind at the time. At this point, he was still in school and had to lie about his age to be eligible to enrol in the diploma program. During this time, he volunteered for a Marxist print publication called Hiru where he mainly wrote on cinema and art.

He spent of lot of time walking around Colombo, going from cultural centre to cultural centre watching whatever films that we being screened and it was at this point, he landed his first job at Lowe Lintas Worldwide, an advertising agency.

He attended the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, India and after returning to Sri Lanka, began work on his first film, The Land of Silence (2001), a production that took 3 years to complete. The Land of Silence was a documentary in black and white about the victims of civil war in Sri Lanka. The film was made using cinematographic equipment from the 1960s and interspersed with occasional dialogues deliberately not translated but relayed by a background commentary. The film transforms images of the present into ghostly archives. The Land of Silence strips away the glory of war and puts a monochrome microscope on soldiers knocked into a mundane and dreary existence half the people they were before putting on the uniform. The documentary was selected by several festivals including Marseilles, Rotterdam and Berlin.

Following the Land of Silence, Vimukthi received a scholarship at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts from the French Government and the Sri Lanka National Film Corporation on the recommendation of Dr. Lester James Peiris and Dr. Tissa Abeysekera. . At the Le Fresnoy he studied under Tasi Ming Liang, Jean Marie-Straub, Jean Luc-Godard and Eugene Greene. Following his time at Fresnoy, he directed a short film Empty for Love – which was shot in France and Sri Lanka. The film was Produced by Lefresnoy and it was officially selected to the Cannes film festival in 2003 and it won the Best Director Award at the Novo Mesto International Short Film festival – Slovenia in 2003 at the same year he became a resident at the Cinéfondation of the Cannes Film Festival. —Wikipedia