TV Times

TV Times

A director with a mission
By Susitha R. Fernando
Internationally acclaimed director Samy Pavel has a genuine reason to do films and teledramas here in Sri Lanka. ‘Sanda Mudunata’ now being telecast on Swarnavahini every Friday at 9. 30 pm is his maiden Sinhala teledrama.

Mr. Pavel who has been living here for seven years is a winner of Gold Remi award at Houston Film Festival 2004 for the Best Director, directing his film ‘Music Garden’ and also Best screenplay for “Letter to Theo”. Samy Povel born and bread in Belgium and France says that his film represents Sri Lankan culture.

Speaking to TV Times about his latest venture teleplay ‘Sanda Mudunata’ Mr. Povel says, “My attempt is to give something novel to the audience while respecting the aesthetic and cultural values of filmmaking.”

I think Sri Lankan TV audiences are intelligent and selective you cannot take them to be fools. Evaluating number of drawbacks in Sri Lankan teledrama scene “Overacting is terribly there in Sri Lankan teledramas.”

Overacting is very often seen in the Bollywood films where even Sharukh Khan overacts most of the time but this is adequately covered up with beautiful music, dances and sets. And this is not a problem for the Indian cinema as they don’t need to reach out for its outside audience to recover the budget.

This is no so with the Sri Lankan cinema. Sri Lankan cinema has to target international heights to meet the budget and as such the Asian perspective for overacting in Sri Lankan films could be a drawback.

Another common weaknesses in Sri Lankan teledramas are that from the first episode of the drama the viewers can tell what happens at the end of the final episode. But what should be done here is to develop the drama step by step using deviations to maintain the suspense right up to the climax.

The audience has the instinct to choose what is good for them and they are not easily cheated. Today people have no inclination to go to the cinema as it consumes both time and money so they have selected the TV a convenient mode of home entertainment. As a result teledrama directors use this opportunity to collect a fast buck by doing ‘anything’ and producing low budget substandard teledramas. Later they resort to find sponsors for these.

The audience is given a minimum 20 minutes viewing while the rest is given to the sponsors to advertise their products. Subsequently they have forgotten that this is a medium that you can touch people by giving them something beautiful.

“In ‘Sanda Mudunata’ my role was to introduce something new to the TV audience. There I wanted to get out of the stereotype stories and focus on shooting, lighting, acting and almost everything to bring some novelty to the Sri Lankan teledrama.

This teledrama really took a long time and editing alone took nearly five months. Explaining how he started the project of Sanda Mudunata, Samy Pavel said that he wanted to do something for the Sri Lankan audience for a long time and it was H. D. Premaratne, who invited him to do a drama for the Swarnavahini .

The script was originally written in French and it was translated to Sinhala by the actor W. Jayasiri.

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