Sisila Gini Gani (Ice on Fire) >>> Harris Makalanda, a wealthy aristocrat and well-known lawyer. One day he meets a beautiful girl, Annette at a party. Later, he meets her again when she hitches a ride with him in heavy rain. He tells her she can change her clothes in one of his bungalows on the way and this leads to a sexual encounter between them. (More..)
	Ananatha Rathriya (Dark Night of the Soul) >>> SUWISAL is a successful, middle-aged company director, but he has a melancholic personality and is very forgetful. His beautiful young fiancée finds herself having to remind him of daily appointments, special occasions and routine things. (More..)
	Pawru Walalu (Walls Within) >>> With the money she earns, working day and night, making clothes on a battered sewing machine, violet manages to provide a living for herself and her two daughters in their small home inside the old fortress of the southern port city of galle. (More..)
	Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a full Moon Day) >>> The land is stricken by drought and ethnic conflict. The lake on the edge of the jungle is almost dry and few miles away the sons of the rural poor are dying on the front of a bitter civil war. As he collects water from what is left in the lake. Wannihami, the blind old man, knows the rain will come soon. (More..)
	Ira Madiyama (August Sun) >>> The film revolves around three narratives which unfold simultaneously. During two scorching days in August, three different groups of people face different experiences due to circumstances beyond their control. These are ordinary people thrown into the heat of war. (More..)
	Akasa Kusum (Flowers of the Sky) >>> Sandhya Rani (Malini Fonseka) is an ageing film star who was once the darling of the silver screen. Having lost fame and fortune in a changing world, she now lives quietly in obscurity. She ekes out a living by renting out a room in her home to the film and television stars of today to satisfy their illicit sexual desires. (More..)

The present state of Sri Lankan cinema does not offer much hope. The industry is experiencing severe hardships, the social environment is hardly conducive to the growth of a wholesome cinema, and creativity is at a low ebb. Seen against this depressing background, Prasanna Vithanage can be described as the only new ray of hope. Clearly, he is a gifted and innovative film director who is deeply dedicated to his chosen field. He has a fine visual imagination linked to a reflective mind. Reflectivity could be privileged as the ruling virtue of his work. For him, films are a way of thinking about society and how it works and does not work. Reflection and cultural specificity meet in his well-crafted images in complex and interesting ways.

Vithanage's movies are firmly tethered to the world we inhabit, and conform to its manifold dictates. However, the net outcome of his semioticised experiences is to provoke in us a deep disquiet about the world we move in and how we have chosen to invest it with meaning. Suffering is crucial to the condition of his characters and indeed it is an inescapable fact of life. However, Prasanna Vithanage succeeds in transforming that suffering into a modality of clarifying moral ideals. This gives his characterization and dissection of the narrative discourses that find articulation in his films. His movies dramatise a dark world of space and mystery in which memory temporarily fades into the distance only to surface with added menacing power.

Source: Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema - Asian Film Centre
Authors: Wimal Dissanayeke and Ashley Ratnavibhushana