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Updated - January 30, 2018 01:04 am IST - COLOMBO
Renowned Sri Lankan filmmaker Dharmasena Pathiraja, fondly referred to as ‘a rebel with a cause’ and acclaimed for his compelling portrayals of urban underclasses, passed away in Kandy on Sunday. He was 74.
Hailing from Kandy in Sri Lanka’s Central Province, the filmmaker is credited with making a critical intervention in Sinhala cinema, with themes that served as social commentaries on the prevailing socio-economic and political realities. He also taught film studies in various Sri Lankan universities.
He was influenced in considerable measure by the works of Indian filmmakers such as Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, whose films he researched for his PhD titled ‘The Dialectic of Region and Nation in the Films of Bengali Independents’ from Monash University.
In addition to making short films and full-length features, Mr. Pathiraja taught film studies in several Sri Lankan universities, including the University of Jaffna. Notably, the Sinhala filmmaker made Ponmani – a Tamil film that zooms into the rarely-heard caste contradictions within the island’s northern Tamil community, a work that is considered a significant contribution by many.
In a 2003 feature on Mr. Pathiraja, Kinema , a journal on cinema from the University of Waterloo, noted that: “For Pathiraja, critical engagement accompanied by a personal, stylised aesthetic was his ‘alternative’.”
Mr. Pathiraja held a rather critical view of war films as a genre. In a 2012 interview to Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, he termed war a “horrible thing” that was not there for filmmakers to make films [on]. “War happens when negotiation between people and authorities break down, or when social cohesion is shattered. One could make films about that, to capture the problems in modern politics. If you look at the war film genre in general, these films glorify violence. They are generally xenophobic or ultra nationalist,” he said. In his view, the ideology of war films was to glorify militarisation and male domination.
He also voiced concern over what he termed “a culture of political quietism” prevailing in the country at that time [in 2012], particularly in the cultural sphere. “I hope we are able to produce courageous filmmakers who are willing to look at contemporary history and the past in the eye and deal with it honestly,” he said in the interview.
Published - January 29, 2018 10:28 pm IST
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