“PARADISE LOST AND FOUND: THE UNCOMPROMISING CINEMA OF PRASANNA VITHANAGE”

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(By Lieutenant Duminda Senarath)

For over three decades, while Sri Lankan cinema has swung between commercial escapism and patriotic epics, one director has consistently looked the other way, towards the uncomfortable silence where the real nation lives. Prasanna Vithanage, at 63, is not just Sri Lanka’s most decorated filmmaker, he is its most necessary.

His career did not begin with a film camera but with a stage. In the turbulent 1980s, the young man from Panadura translated Shaw and Brecht for Sinhala theatre audiences, learning that a story only matters if it can speak to the person in the last row. That lesson became his debut film Sisila Gini Gani, Ice on Fire, in 1992, a film that dared to ask what happens to young men when revolution fails. It was a bold entry, and the country noticed.

What followed was a filmography that reads like an alternative history of Sri Lanka. Purahanda Kaluwara, Death on a Full Moon Day, in 1997, remains his most courageous act. Produced by Japan’s NHK, the film about a soldier who comes home on leave for a funeral became the subject of a government ban. Vithanage challenged it in the Supreme Court and won, making history not just for cinema but for freedom of expression. The film went on to win the Grand Prix at Amiens and become one of the most successful art films ever at the local box office. Ira Madiyama, August Sun, in 2003 wove together the lives of a Sinhalese, a Tamil and a Muslim during the war, and won the Silver Peacock for Best Director in India. Akasa Kusum, Flowers of the Sky, in 2008 dissected the loneliness of a former film star and exposed how our society consumes its women. Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka, With You, Without You, in 2012, a quiet adaptation of Dostoevsky, won the Cyclo d’Or at Vesoul and completed what critics now call his war trilogy, not of battles, but of broken hearts.

He is a filmmaker who has never used a war scene to show the tragedy of war. His camera stays in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the bus stand where people wait for those who never come back. That is his politics, deeply human, deeply feminist, deeply honest.

That honesty brings us to his latest and perhaps most globally resonant work, Paradise. If his earlier films were about the civil war, Paradise is about the economic war that all of us lived through. Shot in the hill country in January 2023, months after the queues and the protests of 2022, the film is an Indo-Sri Lankan production starring India’s Roshan Mathew and Darshana Rajendran. An Indian couple arrives in Sri Lanka for their fifth anniversary because it is cheap, because our currency has fallen. Their celebration is interrupted by a robbery, and as they try to find justice, their marriage begins to crack. The paradise they came to find does not exist.

The world has responded. Paradise won the Kim Ji-seok Award at the Busan International Film Festival, earned four nominations at the 17th Asian Film Awards including Best Film and Best Director, and won Best Story at the Kerala State Film Awards. Presented by Mani Ratnam’s Madras Talkies, it speaks in five languages, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi and English, because Vithanage believes that crisis, like love, has no single language.

But the award is not the story. The story is the method. While others wrote opinion pieces about the crisis, Vithanage turned it into art within months, giving catharsis to a nation that did not have a voice. As he himself said in Mumbai last year, being an artist gives you the opportunity to say certain things objectively and subjectively.

Today, beyond his films, his greatest contribution may be institutional. He founded the Sri Lanka Film and Television Academy and co-founded the International Film Festival of Colombo, creating platforms that did not exist before. He has mentored hundreds without ever starting a formal school.

At a time when Sri Lanka is trying to rebuild its image from economic collapse to Oscar submissions like Riverstone, we need to remember who kept the cinematic soul of this country alive when no one was watching. Prasanna Vithanage did not make films about paradise. He made films that made us question why paradise was lost, and whether we have the courage to find it again.