Cannes 2011. Snapshots: Vimukthi Jayasundara's "Chatrak"

After his brilliant Between Two Worlds (2009), Sri Lankan artist Jayasundara goes to Cannes with a Bengali film.
Marie-Pierre Duhamel

After his brilliant Between Two Worlds (2009), Sri Lankan artist Jayasundara goes to Cannes with a Bengali film, featuring Bengali stars Paoli Dam and Anubrata, in which he does not give in to any compromise with his stylistic and political standpoints.

Strange encounters in the jungle, strange quests in the city. A European soldier (Icelandic actor Tómas Lemarquis) lost in the jungle, an architect in Kolkata involved in a great project, a lost soul who could be his lost brother, a woman, and angry folks expropriated because of the big architectural project—a story to be followed together with Jayasundara's images. Jayasundara creates images. Not paintings, not graphics, not publicity: living visions. Cinematic dreams and nightmares, visible intuitions of the world around, visual understanding of what corruption of the society and corruption of the soul can do.

Jayasundara is a young relentless master, an example of what contemporary cinema can be: an art that ignores the frontiers between the so-called artistic disciplines only to reconcile them in a universal feeling of the current state of the world. Remember Apichatpong's Boonmee: ghosts are among us. They're called history.

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