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Festival Reports

Dreaming of the World at the 2nd Colombo Int’l Film Festival 2015

System Administrator Saturday November 28, 2015

By all accounts, the 2nd Colombo International Film Festival (Nov 6-12 2015) was another banner year. As in its debut festival, long queues again hugged the entrances of cinema buildings and often snaked off into oblivion as thousands of patrons tried to enter the free screenings of over 120 films. With the sponsorship of the Okinawa International Movie Festival for the second year, the festival had the significant participation of the National Film Corporation, who instead became the festival's Main Sponsor this year. Also important was the Ministry of Cultural Affairs who allowed the films to be uncut for the festival. Considering that the country’s 26-year civil war ended in 2009, the openness, allowed for the festival, is an act of faith. It’s also the most important facet of allowing a country’s cinema to think and dream freely and to grow.

The festival collected many areas of cinema, from special sections on Children’s films to important retrospectives featuring Indian master, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Eastern European legend, Emir Kusturica. It included country perspectives from Japan to France as well as a thematic documentary section on Seeking Justice. Two Lifetime Achievement Awards were also given to NETPAC and Cinemaya Founder, Aruna Vasudev, as well as to film director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

For the first time, it introduced a section on Sri Lankan film. In conjunction with NETPAC’s 25th anniversary, the pan-Asian organisation of film professionals inaugurated its jury for this section. The winning Sri Lankan feature was ShameeraRangana Naotunna’s Motor Bicycle(2015), perhaps a modern twist of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). While the Italian neo-realist classic showed the desperate poverty of post-World War II Rome, Motor Bicycle centres on lower class dreams of a post-civil-war Colombo. Like the earlier classic film, Motor Bicycle’s drama pivots on the theft of the vehicle, but this modern update introduces a love story and all the illusion that entails when middle-class dreams clash with the reality of poverty. The film also has a deceptive light-hearted naivete that serves to bring a more brutal contrast to the film’s climax.

The other Sri Lankan film of note was Boodee Keerthisena’s Alone in the Valleythat managed to evoke a Kafka-esquedream-like absurdity, a very fresh perspective to come out of recent Sri Lankan cinema. This film could be paired with Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Swaroopa(Metamorphosis, 2014), a free Sri Lankan adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. While this is the best of Pathiraja’s recent works, this film did not travel widely on the festival circuit, as festival programmers could not understand the local underpinnings of Pathiraja’s adaptation. In short, both Keerthisena's and Pathiraja's films fell victim to foreign stereotypes of what Sri Lankan film should be perceived as.

In this light, it is very urgent that the organisers of the Colombo International Film Festival take a long look at themselves, to realise their own vision and not what it thinks the WORLD wants.

– PHILIP CHEAH

Interview

Supriya Suri's Interview with Muhiddin Muzaffar

Director Muhiddin Muzaffar (1) 2 Min

1. I entered the cinema through the theatre. I was an actor in our local theatre called Kanibadam, named after Tuhfa Fozilova. After working for five years, I decided to do a theatre director course. I graduated with honors and became a director. We successfully staged performances at international festivals.

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