Weary residents (Soma, Lata, Piyasiri) of a war-ravaged country drift through life.Weary residents (Soma, Lata, Piyasiri) of a war-ravaged country drift through life.Weary residents (Soma, Lata, Piyasiri) of a war-ravaged country drift through life.
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Lovely to see -- but you aren't likely to favor it. Watching this on DVD, I soon found myself playing the skip game: using my player's skip feature, I would skip forward ten seconds when I suspected doing so would lose nothing. Then skip back, to see if I would indeed have missed something. Nine times out of ten, it was just the same shot, lingering, lingering ....
OK, lingering for a long time is a valid option, and the lovely visuals do deserve it. And there are scenes quite effectively done. My favorite is a simple right-to-left traveling shot, about fifteen minutes in. A woman walks right to left, but soon outpaces the camera, disappearing out of frame. A young girl runs in the medium distance, also the same direction. In the farther distance, a bus approaches, slowly coming toward the viewer, also angled toward the left. As the pan slows the camera arrives on the woman standing by a roadside tree, which the young girl and the bus reach at the same moment the woman and tree come into view. Three different speeds of motion, three different angles, but all moving to the left, and then arriving together: anchored by a tree which had been central to the composition of the previous shot. Pretty remarkable for a first film.
OK, lingering for a long time is a valid option, and the lovely visuals do deserve it. And there are scenes quite effectively done. My favorite is a simple right-to-left traveling shot, about fifteen minutes in. A woman walks right to left, but soon outpaces the camera, disappearing out of frame. A young girl runs in the medium distance, also the same direction. In the farther distance, a bus approaches, slowly coming toward the viewer, also angled toward the left. As the pan slows the camera arrives on the woman standing by a roadside tree, which the young girl and the bus reach at the same moment the woman and tree come into view. Three different speeds of motion, three different angles, but all moving to the left, and then arriving together: anchored by a tree which had been central to the composition of the previous shot. Pretty remarkable for a first film.
- skinnybert
- Nov 15, 2022
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- TriviaEven though it won the Camera d'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, the film was banned in its home country (Sri Lanka) by the UPFA Government of Mahinda Rajapakse in tandem with the Sri Lankan military. The filmmaker, Vimukthi Jayasundara, received death threats and relocated to France.
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