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What price war?

Sri Lankan film maker Prasanna Vithanage uses the medium to tell the story of people in a war-torn nation, discovers NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAM

PHOTO: R. SHIVAJIRAO

FILM MAKING IS A THERAPY A scene from 'Ira Madiyama'

It's all too easy to forget the human face of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict. When war raged in the country's North-East between the military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, what people saw on their television screens or read in newspapers were numbers — of combatants killed, wounded or missing, of people displaced, of kilograms of rations handed out to refugees.

Reduced to a numbers game, the Sri Lankan conflict could seem as harmless — or even as endorphinised — as a one-day cricket match. Prasanna Vithanage, the celebrated and controversial Sri Lankan film maker, wants to tell the world this is not true, that the war had terrible consequences for ordinary people, and if they pulled through, it is because living is for the most part, hoping.

Ira Madiyama, Vithanage said it is the reality of living with war that he has tried to project in this work, as he did in his 1998 film Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on A Full Moon Day).

"I have lived half my life with the ethnic war. I have been affected by it; I am part of it. And in my films, I have tried to understand how it affects others. For me, filmmaking is a therapy," he said.

Prasanna Vithange

"Death on a Full Moon Day" was about a man whose son, a soldier in the Sri Lankan Army, died fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on the battlefield. The film showed relations between people in a village changing in anticipation of the government's monetary compensation to the soldier's family. The father refuses to accept the Army's word that his son is dead. But the local politician is already making plans for the money that the father does not wish to take.

The film won awards abroad but was banned in Sri Lanka. The government labelled Vithanage — he makes films in Sinhalese, the language of Sri Lanka's majority community — `anti-national' and accused him of trying to scare people away from joining the armed forces at a time when they were engaged in a full-scale war with the Tigers.

A huge success

After a lengthy court battle, Vithanage managed to have it released in Colombo in 2002. It was a box-office hit, the most successful film the Sri Lankan film industry ever made.

In August Sun, Vithanage skilfully pulls together the stories of three people affected by the war — a woman whose husband is missing in action, a child separated from his dog, and a soldier who finds his sister in a brothel — during a two-day period when Sri Lanka is playing a cricket match against Australia.

"The cricket match is a metaphor for the way of life in Sri Lanka. It's almost as if Sri Lankans use the joys of cricket as a compensation for the losses in their own lives," he said.

Sri Lanka wins the match, but the protagonists lose their own battles. The film ends with the three preparing to start all over again. Their stories are based on real life incidents. For the first time, the LTTE's expulsion of Muslims from northern Sri Lanka finds place in popular art.

The film won a clutch of international awards and had a 50-day run in Sri Lanka. But the LTTE trashed it, and recently, an admiral in the Sri Lanka Navy wrote in a newspaper that Vithanage should take instruction from Bollywood to make patriotic films.

The 43-year-old filmmaker is not put out by such criticism. "As a filmmaker, I don't back anyone in this war. There are no superheroes, or even heroes, or villains in it. It's all grey. But people want art, especially cinema, to portray their side positively," he said.

The film also reflects the polarisation in Sri Lanka between different and within communities as a consequence of the war. Although the three main characters are joined by the war, they are unable to connect even though their paths cross. And it tells of the suffering that awaits if Sri Lanka should return to war.

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