Between Two Worlds
(Ahasin Watai)

Several common points run through the films of this Sri Lankan director (Land of Silence, 2002; The Foresaken Land, 2004 ; Chatrak, 2011), one of which is the repetition of a double assertion: Jayasundara’s attachment to the power of a story driven by oral transmission, and his way of gravitating around the theme of abandonment to portray it alternately as either a tearing-apart or a liberating event. His filmmaking thus calls on an imaginary freed from the fitting realism that is at times the expected stereotype of Sri Lankan films. With syncretic inspiration, he rearranges a transmitted cultural heritage by fleshing it out with his own personal references. As a result, Between Two Worlds could just as well portray the mythological survival of a very ancient world as its science-fiction dimension. Between two temporalities, it is above all the uneasy parable or pre-apocalyptic vision of a disaster foretold. JB