Vimukthi Jayasundara

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Vimukthi Jayasundara (* 1977 in Ratnapura ) is a Sri Lankan film director and screenwriter.

biography

Vimukthi Jayasundara was born in the south of Sri Lanka. He worked in the advertising industry and as a film critic before studying at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune from 1998 to 2001 . In India he came to films much more easily, saw 500 productions according to his own statements and was particularly impressed by the works of Andrei Tarkowski and Satyajit Ray . Jayasundara then joined the State Film Department in his home country and made his debut as a filmmaker with the documentary The Land of Silence . The study, which was held in black and white, focused on the victims of the Sri Lankan War of Independence.

Thanks to a grant, Jayasundara was able to continue his studies in France , where he met the Asian filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang at the Le Fresnoy Film School in Tourcoing . He supported him and developed possible film plots with him as a discussion partner. In 2003, the 28-minute short film Vide pour l'amour followed , for which Jayasundara received an invitation to the Cinéfondation series of the Cannes Film Festival , which supports young film students in promoting and completing their projects . Both The Land of Silence and Vide pour l'amour have been shown at numerous international film festivals.

Two years later Jayasundara received another invitation to Cannes for his first feature film Trügerische Stille (2005), this time in the Un Certain Regard section . The drama, shot in January 2004 within 25 days in northwest Sri Lanka, takes place in an unspecified country torn by civil war and follows the family of a village guard. Deceptive silence was well received by critics who praised the aesthetic images and brought Jayasundara the Golden Camera in Cannes . The American critic Manohla Dargis ( The New York Times ) particularly emphasized his depiction of landscapes to convey states of mind, which would be reminiscent of the works of Michelangelo Antonioni .

With the feature film shot in the Sinhalese language , Jayasundara primarily pursued the goal of producing an abstract study of the social and psychological effects of the war without showing any military action. However, the film met with heavy criticism in the director's home country, where the military put pressure on local filmmakers and called for only pro-military films to be made. Influenced by European cinema and writers like Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka , Jayasundara sees himself as a poet who draws inspiration from within. When shooting, he works with a simple script made up of images; the landscape gives him and his actors the rhythm.

Today Jayasundara lives in Colombo and Paris and, together with the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is a representative of a new school in Southeast Asian cinema that " sees history and memory, fantasy and photographic reality as malleable mass." In 2009 he received for his second feature film Ahasin Wetei ( English-language festival title Between Two Worlds ) an invitation to the competition for the Golden Lion of the 66th Venice Film Festival . The drama accompanies a young man through the provinces while unrest and looting broke out in the cities. “In a kind of metaphorical documentarism” the film combines “visions of a real civil war with prehistoric rites, everyday actions are surprisingly transformed into mass choreographies”, says Daniel Kothenschulte ( Frankfurter Rundschau ).

Filmography (selection)

  • 2003: Vide pour l'amour (short film)
  • 2005: Deceptive Silence ( Sulanga Enu Pinisa )
  • 2009: Ahasin Wetei
  • 2011: Chatrak
  • 2011: 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (short film)
  • 2012: Light in the Yellow Breathing Space (short film)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c cf. Portrait of Zhuang Wubin at contemporary-magazines.com (accessed September 12, 2009)
  2. ↑ a b cf. Phillips, Richard: “We need to create some artistic space” at wsws.org, October 2, 2006 (accessed September 12, 2009)
  3. ↑ cf. Dargis, Manohla: Sri Lanka's Walking Wounded And Their Fractured Lives . In: The New York Times, June 23, 2006, p. 14
  4. ↑ cf. The pity of war . In: The Nation (Thailand), October 14, 2005 (accessed September 12, 2009 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft)
  5. ↑ a b cf. Kothenschulte, Daniel: The outer and the inner swamp . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , September 10, 2009, p. 34
personal data
SURNAME Jayasundara, Vimukthi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sri Lankan film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH Ratnapura , Sri Lanka