Vimukthi Jayasundara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (October 2007) |
This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (October 2007) |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
Vimukthi Jayasundara was born in Ratnapura in southern Sri Lanka. He was a journalist, film critic and writer for the screen, and he attended the Institute for Film and Television in Pune, India. After making The Land Of Silence, a documentary in black and white about the victims of the civil war which was selected for several festivals (Marseilles, Rotterdam, Berlin), Vimukthi Jayasundara studied in France at the Fresnoy School of Art before becoming a resident at the Cinéfondation of the Festival de Cannes in 2003. In 2004 he directed his first feature, La terre abandonnée, Vimukthi Jayasundara's picture, which took the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or for best first film (an award previously won by Dennis Hopper and Spike Lee), is done with sparse dialogue and haunting tableaux of the isolated rural landscape. "Land" has some of the strange poetry of Ingmar Bergman's great 1968 anti-war film "Shame," but it's a more cryptic, exotic work, burningly immediate yet imbued with some of the quality of timeless fable. Only 27, Jayasundara seems a moviemaker of high promise. His "Forsaken Land," a work of surprising sophistication and cinematic eloquence, may signal the arrival of a major international film talent.
He is the first Sri Lankan who became this past May the prestigious Camera d’Or award for Best First Film at the world renowned Cannes Film Festival for his Sinhalese language film Sulanga Enu Pinisa /The Forsaken Land. He previously directed a documentary called The Land of Silence in 2001 and a short film, Empty for Love, in 2002.
He says: “If The Forsaken Land has something to do with my country’s history, it is especially through its conveyance of the suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace – in between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere… For me, filmmaking is an ideal vehicle for expressing the mental stress people experience as a result of the emptiness and indecisiveness they feel in their lives. With the film, I wanted to examine emotional isolation in a world where war, peace and God have become abstract notions.”