During the month of August and in collaboration with the Locarno International Film Festival’s Open Doors initiative, Filmatique will host a collection of films from new talents in Southeast Asia.

The Forsaken Land

Two soldiers rotate between shifts guarding an empty, barren landscape.  While Anura is a family-man, and Piyarsiri a much older alcoholic, both their faces communicate a distant, weary sadness formed in their duty’s absent meaning, the howling of wind.  A sense of quiet desperation extends to the lives of Sri Lanka’s women— Anura’s wife dresses each morning and boards the bus to a job that remains unspecified; her sister yearns to leave and become a teacher; her daughter, Batti, seems to best understand that the monotony will not cease.

An evocative, stylistically-accomplished portrait of ennui inside war-torn Sri Lanka, Vimukthi Jayasundara’s feature film debut The Forsaken Land won the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant at Rotterdam and premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it won the Camera d’Or for best debut film.