• Visakesa Chandraratnam’s ‘Munnel’ and Jagath Manuwarna’s ‘Whispering Mountains’ win awards

Two Sri Lankan productions were recognised at the 52nd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which took place from 25 January to 5 February in the Netherlands. Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s Munnel won a special jury prize in the IFFR’s Tiger Competition, while Jagath Manuwarna’s film Whispering Mountains won the NETPAC Award, which recognises the best Asian feature film at the IFFR.

The IFFR offers a high-quality line-up of carefully selected fiction and documentary feature films, short films, and media art. The festival’s focus is on recent work by talented new filmmakers, but it also gives room for retrospectives and themed programmes. Other winners at the IFFR 2023 include Aqueronte by Manuel Muñoz Rivas (Spain), which won the KNF Award, La Palisiada by Philip Sotnychenko (Ukraine), which won the FIPRESCI Award, and Endless Borders by Abbas Amini (Germany, Czech Republic, Iran), which won the VPRO Big Screen Award.

Visakesa Chandrasekaram’s ‘Munnel’ wins special jury award

In Munnel, which stars Sivakumar Lingeswaran and Kamala Sri Mohan Kumar, an ex-Tamil Tiger militant returns home in a delicate, impactful portrait of post-war consciousness. It won a special jury award in the Tiger Competition, which is the festival’s flagship award, under which 16 titles were presented this year.

While the winner of the Tiger Competition was Le spectre de Boko Haram by Cyrielle Raingou (Cameroon), New Strains by Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan (the US) won a special jury award as well. 

The jury statement for Munnel called it a “great simple story about a young man caught between revolution and authoritarianism”.

Accepting the award, filmmaker Chandrasekaram said: “By sharing these stories, we are exercising our freedom of expression. And by doing so, we are protecting our democracies. Without freedom of expression, we don’t have democracy, and without democracy, we can’t make films of our free will.”

During a press conference held with the filmmakers selected for the Tiger Competition, Chandrasekaram shared that the cast includes a lot of people from the Jaffna peninsula. “In the South, the majority of people speak Sinhala and there is already a film industry, with people who are trained to do what they are doing. In the North, it is not so. And there is a very small population.”

He went on to say that military occupation is also a huge issue, with surveillance being high. Munnel is about Tamil Tigers and the military, which made it a sensitive production. The filmmaker added that the military demanded that certain scenes be removed, which they decided against doing.

While filming, the cast and crew faced several challenges as well, since it was during the people’s movement or the “aragalaya”, which was mainly centred in the South but took place during a time of fuel and economic crises that affected the entire country. Some of the cast and crew were part of the movement as well.

“We were about to start shooting and about two days before, the movement in the South was attacked by some thugs and there was a retaliation. Some of the politicians’ houses were torched and it was like a warzone in the south. In the North, it was relatively calm. So we were in a situation of asking ‘should I pull the plug on this project or are we going ahead?’ And we decided to go ahead,” Chandrasekaram said.



‘Whispering Mountains’ wins NETPAC Award

Jagath Manuwarna’s 2023 film Whispering Mountains was the winner of the NETPAC Award at the IFFR. The NETPAC Award is awarded to the best Asian feature film by a jury from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema. This year, the jury consisted of Roger Garcia, Bradley Lieuw, and Italo Spinelli.

According to IFFR, the jury report for Manuwarna’s film read: “The jury gives its award this year to a film that looks at the troubled past of a nation from the point of view of the near future. Combining artistic ambition with commercial convention, this first work from a country whose film industry is emerging as one of the most promising in Asia, we recognise the force of Whispering Mountains, the feature directorial debut by Jagath Manuwarna of Sri Lanka.”

In Whispering Mountains, the young people of Sri Lanka are committing suicide in droves. The Government blames a supernatural virus that must be cleansed by an ancient ritual. The cast includes Sarath Kothalawala, Dharmapriya Dias, Priyantha Sirikumara, and Sampath Chaminda Jayaweera.