Nita wins international acclaims once again
Director Visakesa Chandrasekaram
Renowned actress Nita Fernando won her second international award at the recently ended Nice International Film Festival in France.
Nita won the Best Actress award in the Foreign films category for her role in Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s latest film ‘Paangshu’. In addition to Nita, costume designer of the film, Kumara Karawdeniya won the Best Costume Designer award at the festival. Visakesa was nominated for the Best Screenplay award.
This is a major award for Nita after her Best Actress Award at the 1998 Singapore International Film Festival. There she won the award for her role violet in Prasanna Vithanage’s film Pavuru Walalu. (Walls Within)
“This was the most challenging role I have ever played in my career as an actress. It is a role of a mother who is on a relentless journey to find justice for her abducted son,” Nita said after winning the award.
“I am ever so grateful to my director Visakesa for the support he has given,” Nita added.
Expressing about Nita’s acting and her dedication for the role, director Chandrasekaram said “I think it is a challenging role. It involves learning lot of skills. Nita played a role of dhobi woman, where she had to learn lot of skills,”.
To be a dhobi woman Nita had to learn swimming and her dedication was such that she started learning swimming at least one year before the film shooting.
“She was extremely committed to her role. On the other hand probably my method would have been challenging because we worked with the cast and conducted a number of rigorous workshops before placing them in front of the camera,” director explained.
Kumara Karawdeniya
“Nita is an extremely talented actress and her talent is built on her enormous experience. And she is an humble individual and that humbleness itself is a great thing. That kind of faith on her director who was doring his second film is very important. Lot of actresses with the experience they have, would have lost many good qualities but Nita was not so. I think that is the key to her success and that is why she did so well,”
It was also the first time that a Sri Lankan costume designer won an award at a foreign film festival.
Kumara Karawdeniya who also handled the art direction of ‘Paangshu’ noted that Nice International Film Festival in France is a platform for internationally talented artistes. “It was an honour to represent Sri Lanka at this great festival,” Kumara who went to France representing ‘Paanghu’ said.
Director Visakesa Chandrasekaram speaking about the festival said “This is one of the foreign film festivals with lot of categories. There are sections for short films, feature films and a couple of awards are allocated for the foreign films, for which we won awards.
“What is most important is we have to understand that we competed with highly sophisticated films with lot of capital. But our film is an independent film that was produced with lot of hardships,” the director said highlighting the importance of the awards the film has won.
“When you consider in that context our achievement is extremely significant,” he added.
Asked about the challenges in releasing films specially under the present security situation in the country, he said “anyway there is a challenge in releasing the film of this nature”.
“Regardless of the present situation it is challenging to get a film to the distribution channels. The distribution of films is kind of oligopoly and it is built on income generation.
“On top of that people are scared to go out to public places. We are still in the process of recovering. It is challenging to get the film to the audience. We have to work with the distributors,” he added.
