Official Web Site of Prasanna Vithanage

DELHI-BASED Anwar Jamal has made only one feature film so far: Swaraj. Screened in 45 international Festivals, it has bagged honours including the National Award for Best Film on Social Issues (2003). He is clear about why he wants to make films. "For me, to be an artist means just one thing: to work on an original idea, in a style you feel best suited to what you want to say. The role of an artist is to intervene in his time, to say, `look, I understand the past in this manner, I'm bringing a few idioms and metaphors to show what is important to me here and now'."

When he meets old friend Prasanna Vithanage, the daring and sensitive Sri Lankan film-maker, in Chennai in May, Jamal gets into a discussion over an issue crucial to both: what are the options left to a serious film-maker in a world that has little patience with and lots of suspicion of a film that goes off the beaten track?

In Iran, despite religio-political restrictions, film-makers form an empathetic community. Celebrity directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi script or edit works by newcomers. Says Jamal, "Here in Tamil Nadu, Sreekar Prasad and Lakshminarayanan have been equally supportive. They do big-budget films but also took up mine saying, it has something original." Vithanage smiles as he discloses that his visit to Chennai was to personally hand over the Sri Lankan Sarasavi Award for Best Editing to Sreekar Prasad for his August Sun.

Vithanage admits that it is more difficult to make serious films in Sri Lanka now than it was five years ago. The Sri Lankan film industry is no longer heavily subsidised. The National Film Corporation has stopped distributing every film that got a censors' certificate. With private distributors in charge, films not blatantl y commercial face the risk of rejection.

The days of government support for good cinema are long past in India. Distribution continues to be difficult. For Jamal, the greater problem is the assembly line production method and the copying of successful, populist models. Though most of these ventures end up as box office disasters, there is no place for work independent of the state or the market. But Jamal is not discouraged. Access to the Internet exposes plagiarism as never before. Surely, survival in the next decade will demand originality.

"Freedom!" smiles Vithanage. "Our ethnic and religious polarisation is a barrier in itself. Forget state censorship, we have to reckon with people's censorship. Each community will have its own take on any issue dealt with in a film. If I show the sufferings caused by war, people who wage those wars see it as a condemnation of their community, their religion."

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