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Kala Korner - by Dee Cee

A boost for Sri Lankan cinema
In what may be a unique exercise, a DVD featuring a Sinhala film with language sub-titles along with an hour-long documentary on the director of the film is being circulated in France. The film maintains the original sound track with dialogues and music in Sinhala and the sub-titles are made available in two languages – French and English. They will soon be in another two - German and Italian. The film is 'Wekande Walauwe' and the director, Lester James Peries.

In the French version, there is a most interesting narrative by Lester on his career in filmmaking in English, with French sub-titles. He goes back to his London days in the mid 1940s when he was a journalist attached to the London office of the Times of Ceylon, the making of the first documentary 'Soliloquy' and his meeting with several movie personalities including Lindsay Anderson who edited a film magazine titled 'Sequence' and Ralph Keene, whom he interviewed at his London editor's request when Keene was appointed to come to Ceylon to head the Government Film Unit (GFU).

Lester spent four years at the GFU during which time he made "three films on boring subjects". He admits it was a challenge in a way and he tried to make the best of the subjects – malaria, driving habits (for the Traffic Police) and keeping the City clean. He confesses he owes a great deal of gratitude to Keene for showing him the way. The young French filmmaker – he was just about 22, Lester reckons – has included a number of stills from these early documentaries making the film very meaningful.

Though Lester's first feature film, 'Rekava' was a simple story based on superstitious beliefs, "it was very difficult to make", according to Lester. "At the end, it was a disaster at the box office. It was a miserable failure." Maria Schell who happened to be here at the time saw the film at a cinema in Mount Lavinia and promoted it to be invited to Cannes. Thus a Sinhala film gained recognition at an international festival for the first time. Lester also discussed how he made Martin Wickramasinghe's trilogy with the second film, 'Kaliyugaya' (1982) being made exactly twenty years after 'Gamperaliya' using the same cast. The story too was written twenty years after the first and captured the social, cultural and political changes in the country. The third, 'Yuganthaya' revolving round the family's next generation was made the next year. The trilogy was a social commentary during the period 1910 to around 1960.

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