Blogical Conclusion
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
The New Indian Express

“I WANTED TO AIM THE CAMERA AT MYSELF”

NOV 30, 2008 - Prasanna Vithanage is at Goa to present his latest film, Akasa Kusum (Flowers in the Sky), which I’d caught a while earlier, while still in Chennai, courtesy its editor and co-producer, Sreekar Prasad. While I found the film thoroughly engaging and, often, quite moving, I was more intrigued by the frame of mind that brought about this atypical effort. And hence my first question to the director…

FILM-MAKER PRASANNA VITHANAGE

Your films, so far, have been macroscopic to a large extent, looking at life in Sri Lanka through the lens of war and strife. But with Akasa Kusum, you seemed to have entered extremely personal territory.

So far, I’ve aimed my camera at the society in general. This time, I wanted to aim the camera at myself. I was determined to make a film about my own profession. That’s how Akasa Kusum came about.

Are you saying you wanted to make something like 8-1/2, which revolved around a director, or Day for Night, which was about the making of a movie? Because your film is about the travails of an actress…

And why not? Actresses are from the same profession. We use images of women all the time to ignite the desires of audiences, and then we discard these women. We are a part of this process. So even if the film may not be autobiographical – as in, it isn’t about my life – it is about the life of an actress I know.

What made you focus on an actress instead of an actor? Is it because their careers are typically short-lived, and once their ability to, as you put it, “ignite the desires of audiences” fades away, they fade away too?

In Asian countries, when a woman becomes a star, she becomes the victim of a particular lifestyle. She forgets her true self, over a period of time. She’s looked upon not as a person but as an actress, as an embodiment of what she does. And suddenly, when you’re out of a job, you’re not even a person any more, because the only thing you ever were is an actress. That, to me, was interesting.

Malini Fonseka is wonderful in the film. Were there any associations she brought to the script that made you choose her?

She’s the queen of Sri Lankan cinema. Even today, she’s busy with her acting and her teledramas, so she’s not exactly faded from public memory, the way Sandhya Rani (the character she plays) has. I thought she could depict both the faded-from-public-eye aspect, as well as the star quality. And she made the film her own. She’s my sister-in-law in real life, and I used a lot of her life while writing the screenplay. It’s possibly more her autobiography now than mine.

Didn’t that prove problematic, because, to an audience that doesn’t know better, it could come across as her life story, especially since you use clips from her famous films?

When I first suggested she play Sandhya Rani, she refused. This was in 1991. She did say that people would think it was her life story. Then she fell ill with cancer and underwent treatment, and afterwards, she agreed to the film. When the film was premiered in Sri Lanka, no one came up to congratulate her. They probably were stunned or embarrassed by what they must have thought was a real-life story. She was very upset, but then the congratulatory calls started coming in.

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