This weekend, make plans for a Sri Lankan film festival

PUNE: The Pune International Centre (PIC) and National Film Archive of India (NFAI) opened a festival of Sri Lankan films on Friday. A total of 11 films will be screened until the closing on Monday.

Sri Lankan playwright and filmmaker Dharmasiri Bandaranayake opened the festival along with PIC director Amitabh Malik and Latika Padgaonkar, a member of PIC.

After the opening ceremony, the acclaimed Lankan director Prasanna Vithanage’s film With You, Without You, a love story set against the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s civil war, was screened. The festival’s selection includes works of filmmakers like Vithanage, Asoka Handagama, as well as Vimukthi Jayasundara.

Bandaranayake’s first film Hansa Vilak will be screened at the festival on Saturday evening, and at the opening ceremony, he spoke of his inspiration from Indian filmmakers. “I consider filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, and Lester James Peiris as the fathers of Asian cinema, and the film screened here is inspired by their work.”

The filmmaker also shared his history with the NFAI, “This is my third visit to Pune and this institute. Mr PK Nair, the former head of NFAI, helped me be a part of the film appreciation course in 1983, and I came back in 1989 to escape the violence in Sri Lanka.”