Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

Award winning ‘Soundless Dance’ at Goethe hall

- By Susitha Fernando

Multi-awarded Sri

Lankan self-exiled young filmmaker Pradeepan Raveendran ‘Soundless Dance’ will be screened at 6 pm on November 6 at the Goethe Hall in Colombo 7. The film screening will be followed by a discussion curated by Anomaa Rajakaruna.

In the spring of 2009, Sri Lanka’s decades long civil war is entering its most violent phase. Siva, a young Sri Lankan refugee living illegally in France, has lost contact with the family he was forced to leave behind. Haunted by the trauma of the war that devastated his childhood and obsessed by the flow of images on the Internet, Siva sinks into a waking dream that propels him into the heart of the battlefiel­d.Screenplay written by Jean Anouilh and Pradeepan himself, the film is produced by Mathias Bourrissou­x, Elisabeth Pawlowski, Elsa Minisini, Pradeepan Raveendran, Nagaluxmi Sivasamboo and Kabilan Sivaratnam.

The film stars Patrick Yogarajan, Manoranjan Jegatheesw­aran, Lavan Nadarajah and Susiananth­an Nadarajah.

Pradeepan won the Best Debut Film award at the 5th Jaffna Internatio­nal Cinema Festival (JICF) held in September this year. The jury which adjudicate­d the award for the debut film comprised of Prof. Neloufer de Mel (Sri Lanka), V. K. Joseph (India) and Cayathri Divakalala (Sri Lanka) and in their jury statement it is stated, “for its powerful story of a young Tamil man, and only son, who flees Sri Lanka’s ethnic war and finds himself as a refugee in France;”

Among the number of awards and recognitio­n, Pradeepan in 2017 received the Open Doors, Leopards of Tomorrow and Filmmakers Academy programs, a twomonth residency offered by the Winterthur Internatio­nal Short Film Festival, in collaborat­ion with Villa Sträuli and the Locarno Festival.

 ??  ?? A scene from ‘Soundelss Dance’
A scene from ‘Soundelss Dance’
 ??  ?? Pradeepan Raveendran
Pradeepan Raveendran
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