by WASANTHA RUPASINGHE
Prasanna Vithanage
“Artists have the capacity to expose the reality of war”
Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithange recently spoke with the WSWS about With You, Without You (Oba Nethuwa Oba Ekka). The 90-minute feature is the final instalment of his war trilogy, which deals with the human cost of the Sri Lankan government’s 30-year civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Death on a Full Moon Day (Purahanda Kaluwara [1997]) and August Sun (Ira Mediyama [2003]) were the first two films in the series.
Although With You, Without You was released internationally in early 2013 and won several awards, public screenings of the movie were banned in Sri Lanka. The Public Performances Board (PPB) claimed Vithanage’s movie could internationally “discredit” the armed forces.
The film is based on The Good Woman, an 1876 novella by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, and transposed to contemporary Sri Lanka. It centres on the relationship between Sarathsiri, a Sinhalese pawnbroker, and Selvi, a Tamil girl sent by her parents from the island’s northern war zones to the safer central highlands region. The two fall in love and marry, but their relationship is poisoned by memories of the horrors perpetrated during the war.
With You, Without You was reviewed by the WSWS in June 2014 and a statement condemning the ban issued by the Socialist Equality Party’s presidential candidate, Pani Wijesiriwardane, on December 25.
Last month the film was released and screened in Sri Lankan cinemas, after the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government appointed a new PPB. The repressive censorship regime, however, still remains. In March, director Nilendra Deshapriya was informed that he would be stopped from making a film about the life of Sri Lankan journalist Richard de Zoysa, who was tortured and murdered by Sri Lankan death squads in 1990.
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