...ANANTHAYA...: VIMUKTHI JAYASUNDARA

Early life

Vimukthi Jayasundara was born in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka. He was educated at Mahinda College, Galle. Vimukthi began his cinematic career as a journalist, film critic and screenwriter. He attended the Institute for Film and Television in Pune, India. He returned to Sri Lanka and was employed at the Lowe Lintas Worldwide ad agency as a copywriter for three years.
His 1st film, The Land Of Silence, a documentary in black and white about the victims of civil war was selected by several festivals including Marseilles, Rotterdam and Berlin. The film made with cinematographic equipment from the 1960s and interspersed with occasional dialogues deliberately not translated but relayed by a background commentary, the film transforms images of the present into ghostly archives. It refuses to intensify the horror by making it appear close at hand, and denounces the alliance between technological virtuosity and fascination with war. Rather, it has faith in “history as a source of knowledge” to counteract silence.
’Vimukthi Jayasundara enrolled as a post-graduate at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts. Following his time at Fresnoy, he directed a short film Empty for Love –was shot in France and Sri Lanka. the film was Produced by Lefresnoy. this film was officially selected to the Cannes film festival in 2003 and it won the Best Director Award at the Novo Mesto International Short Film festival – Slovenia in 2003 at the same year he became a resident at the Cinéfondation of the Cannes Film Festival.

Recent works

The Forsaken Land

In 2005 he directed his first feature, The Forsaken Land (Sinhala: Sulanga Enu Pinisa). It won the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or.^[1] He was the first Sri Lankan to win the prestigious award. The film is minimalist, constructed with sparse dialogue and a haunting tableaux of an isolated desolate rural landscape. The film is considered by many international critics to be one of the most important cinematic statements to emerge from Asia in the last ten years.^{[citation needed]} this film won the Jury Prize at the New Delhi Osian’s-Cinefan international Film Festival in India, 2005 and also won Golden Harvest for the Best Film at the Bangkok world Film festival in Thailand, 2006. The Forsaken Land was co-produced by Unlimited, Les Films de l'Etranger, Onoma and Arte France Cinema, in association with Film Council Productions (Sri Lanka) - with Philippe Avril as executive producer. The Forsaken Land was released in France by Tadrart Films (French title: La terre abandonnée) and in United States by New Yorker. The film is available on DVD in America and France (MK2 vidéo) as well.

Between Two Worlds

AHASIN WETEIBetween Two Worlds, his second feature film, was produced by Les Films Hatari and Unlimited, co-produced by Arte France Cinéma and Film Council Productions and Anura Silva in Sri Lanka. The cast includes Chinese actress Huang Lu, Thusitha Laknath, Kaushalya Fernando and Steve de la Zilwa. Cinematography was by Channa Deshapriya, and original music was by Lakshman Joseph de Saram. This film was officially selected for the Competition at the 66 Venice International film festival in 2009 and was nominated for the prestigious Golden Lion. also it got nominated for Achievement in Directing at the Asia Pacific screen Awards -Australia in 2009 . at the Barcelona Asian film festival in Spain, 2010 this film won the Best Asian Film Award. Between Two Worlds was invited to more than 100 film festivals around the world.

Mushroomes aka Chatrack

Directors fortnight- Cannes Film Festival 2011
Jayasundara s 3rd feature Chatrack continues to explore South Asian psyches contorted by massive social forces, but this time he makes a significant leap north. This is his first film set in India. Rahul (Sudip Mukherjee) is a Bengali architect returning to Kolkata after years of work in Dubai, where he managed a huge construction site. Awaiting him is his beautiful girlfriend Paoli (Paoli Dam), who lives alone and far from her family. But Rahul’s seemingly successful life is overshadowed by the search for his brother (Sumeet Thakur), said to now be mad and living in the forest, where he sleeps in the trees. Despite appearances, the two brothers may have much in common. Part surreal song of nature, part muffled cry of urban despair, Mushrooms hovers like a dream. Jayasundara blends minimalist aesthetics with a thoughtful, melancholy tone to evoke his characters’ alienation from their surroundings. In the city, constant construction reflects the social convulsions taking place. In the woods, the arrival of a European soldier manifests the feeling of a natural environment unsettled and compromised by violent order. Jayasundara’s films can never be entirely defined by their plots. Encouraging each viewer to meet him partway, he crafts his narratives as a series of questions and his characters as open forms. Working outside his home country for the first time, and aided by the capable Sri Lankan cinematographer Channa Deshapriya, this unique filmmaker has brought a fascinating visitor’s eye to contemporary West Bengal. (Cameron Bailey , Co-Director, Toronto International film Festival)
His work speaks from the borders: those that separate a country from another, modern cities from ancestral land, and the threshold between the living and the dead. And from there, it erases the borders between fiction and documentary, between cinema and visual arts, expanding the very limits of filmmaking, generating hypnotic visions, pictures of great plastic beauty, and situations that go from the surreal to the humoristic.
the most important film event in Chile, Valdivia International Film Festival is the first film festival to program A retrospective of films by Vimukthi Jayasundara

filmographie

Thibiri Dela (short)-1996 Land Of silence(short)-2002 Empty for Love(short)-2003 The Forsaken Land-2005 Between Two Worlds-2009 Mushrooms- 2011 Through the Windshield-(in Preparation)
Memento international -world sales Company based in Paris announced that, as well as Between Two Worlds, their Label Artscope is now representing Vimukthi Jayasundara’s debut feature The Forsaken Land along with his two renowned shorts The Land Of Silence (2001) and Empty For Love (2003). and Mushrooms(2011) represented by Austrian Film distributor,eastwest-distribution.