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