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Winner of Cannes' prestigious Camera d'or prize in 2005, The Forsaken Land is an exquisitely shot, visually stunning poetic drama. The Forsaken Land reveals its secrets gradually shot by shot with painterly stylized compositions reflecting the disorientation and desolation of un-ending civil war.

Set near a desolate military camp on the wind swept coast of Sri Lanka, the film unfolds in a sort of no man's land criss-crossed by tanks and military trucks carrying soldiers. In this liminal space of civil war, two men work as guards, who are alternately bored and oblivious, or humiliated by those who have more power than they do. This is reflected by Anura, who lives with his unmarried sister and young attractive wife, and seems to know nothing about the emotional conflicts and intense and impersonal sexual encounters of those around him.   The characters in the film drift through life as if they were ghosts, casualties of a civil war that hangs over them like a curse. Sparse but punctuated by moments of intense violence and beauty, Vimukthi Jayasundara's remarkable, haunting and mesmerizing first feature is both an existential drama and a reflection on the deadening alienation caused by a permanent state of war.

Winner of Cannes' prestigious Camera d'or prize and premiering at 3rd I
SFISAFF 2006   - West Coast Premiere.

 

 

Sponsors

Exclusively sponsored by Center for South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley

Co-presenters:

Dhamaal
Consulat Général de France à San Francisco
Alliance Française de San Francisco
San Francisco Film Society
EKTA
Center for South Asia ( Stanford University)
Asian Art Museum
San Francisco Cinematheque
Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University