Between Two Worlds

Sri Lanka's civil conflict raged so furiously for twenty-six long years that when it was declared over, one of the main reactions was numb disbelief. The fighting has stopped but the stark symbols of war are not so easily erased... A man washes up on the shore and makes his way into a rioting city. He rescues a foreign woman, and they begin travelling out to the hills. But instead of refuge, the countryside reveals increasing menace. What begins as enigmatic soon moves to unsettling, then descends into the stark stabs of violence particular to civil war. Jayasundara's Sri Lanka is a mythic place where war has collapsed the space between past and present, has militarized traditional rituals and, perhaps worst of all, has made the mute witnessing of horror an everyday act. What elevates his filmmaking from commentary to art is the sophistication of his symbolism and his fluid, graceful articulation of pain. Cameron Bailey, 2009 TIFF