Written & directed by Rajee Samarasinghe
This film emerged from footage originally captured for a feature documentary on enforced disappearances among Sri Lanka’s Tamil population—specifically, an interview with a mother whose son vanished in the war’s final stages. In revisiting this footage, I also revisit the challenges of representing this particular testimony, which eluded me, one that could not be fully conveyed within the framework of the original film. This iteration reshapes the original context, exploring the divide between me and her, the intersection of ethnographic and colonial perspectives, and questioning cinema’s ability to bear witness. While echoes of past devastations are suggested, they remain elusive, unraveling and disintegrating as they unfold. The text read in the film was sourced from Robert Gardner’s memoir, The Impulse to Preserve.