I first heard of Sanath Nandasiri through Sunil Sarath Perera. Much of the work that brought them together – including “Mage Ratata Dalada Himi Saranayi” and “Sanda Kaluwara” – were buttressed by a poignant attitude to the world outside, which appealed to me. These were discernibly different to, say, a song like “Premathura Hangum” (Ajantha Ranasinghe). The man’s voice ...
There’s a sweet, almost naive sense of innocence in the early performances of Vasanthi Chathurani. It’s a new sensibility, to me, since a very few actors here, male or female, have been as able as she has been to project a form of purity that is at once enticing and delicate. Most of our actors are content in entrancing ...
Sena, the protagonist of Madawala S. Ratnayake’s Akkara Paha, embodies for me the failure of the post-1956 youth to realise their social aspirations. Lester James Peries selected Milton Jayawardena, then an unknown player, for the role in his adaptation, while days after his choice was finalised he was visited by Vijaya Kumaratunga. I think it was a blessing, for ...
The seventies and eighties clearly were tumultuous decades for our cinema. Most commentators, in their rush to inject political relevance to our cultural history, tend to see in them the flowering of a political cinema. True. That does not, however, belittle the other precedents, landmarks, and revolutions which our directors, actors, and scriptwriters wrought. It was in the seventies, ...
Not too many years ago, before I found a job, I was involved with tracking down, calling, and interviewing veterans from various cultural fields who had contributed something substantive to Sri Lanka. I would summarise their lives and work and try to fit those into the (horrendously meagre) space of a 1,500 or 2,500 word article (which would sometimes ...
He was certainly one of the very best Singer/ Songwriters that Sri Lanka was proud to call their own. Clarence Wijewardena wrote many songs, most of them, at the request of friends who, in turn, had friends wishing to record a “Clarence-song”. This writer was already in Australia, when Clarence wrote a song entitled “Dilhani”, dedicated to the baby- ...
He was certainly one of the very best Singer/ Songwriters that Sri Lanka was proud to call their own. Clarence Wijewardena wrote many songs, most of them, at the request of friends who, in turn, had friends wishing to record a “Clarence-song”. This writer was already in Australia, when Clarence wrote a song entitled “Dilhani”, dedicated to the baby- ...
Keli Madala, D. B. Nihalsinghe’s fourth film, was arguably also his weakest. It teeters between anger and hope, between idealism and cynicism, rather unstably, and it concentrates that conflict of opposites within the terse, tragic love story between the politician and his teenage paramour. The two most memorable sequences depict the shift from reconciliation to malice in that story: ...
එම් කේ රොක්සාමි තැනූ – වැයූ අම මී ගි බිඳු – 03 වන කොටස සිත් පහන් කර නිවා සනසාලන සත්සර රටාවෙන් අවස්ථානුකූලව මිදී යොවුන් සමනල් වියේ ජවය කුඵ ගැන්වෙන රංගන ලතාව පොබයූ සංගීත රිද්මයට අවතිර්ණ වන්නට ඔහු අපුරු සමත්කමක් දැක්විය. You’re my one and only one …………. I’m your ever loving one ………….. Your are my one and only ...
“It must be seen today, by the young of today,” Ranjith Rubasinghe told me over lunch. He was talking about Sagara Jalaya, Sumitra Peries’s fifth film, which I think is one of the three or four most perfectly constructed films ever made here, and which I believe is Sumitra’s masterpiece. Those who watch it today are often overwhelmed by ...
