What about the title? What does that connote?

I wanted it to be some sort of metaphor for stars. Akasa Kusum refers to the stars in the sky, and also to their impermanence. They disappear after a while.

That’s beautiful. In the story, you have two sets of mother-daughter relationships, one between Sandhya Rani and the soap star Shalika (the marvellous Dilhani Ekanayake), who moves into the older actress’ home, and the one between Sandhya Rani and her estranged daughter Priya (Nimmi Harasgama). But the latter comes very late into the film, and we do not quite feel that Shalika’s arrival into Sandhya Rani’s life is some sort of compensation for Priya’s departure. Is this intentional?

We wanted to keep the relationship between Sandhya Rani and Priya as discreet as possible – because once that relationship comes to the centre, the interaction between Sandhya Rani and Shalika automatically takes a backseat. And we didn’t want that. Also, Priya hated her mother for abandoning her and had forgotten about her till Sandhya Rani resurfaced as a soap star. Only then did Priya call her mother. If Sandhya Rani is the protagonist, Priya is the antagonist. And we wanted to keep her in the background till their destinies collide.

When Priya becomes pregnant and she moves into an apartment with her woman-friend, it appeared to me that they were a lesbian couple. Is that the case, or did I over-interpret this situation?

Yes, they were a lesbian couple, but we didn’t want to emphasise the fact and make it sensational. That would make it seem that they were not normal, while we wanted to treat them very normally, as just another family. Highlighting this would have taken away the focus from the rest of the story. The main thing to concentrate on, in this part, is that Priya decides to keep the child because she wants to prove to Sandhya Rani that she is nothing like her, that she is better than her mother.

It’s interesting, then, that Priya’s profession as a karaoke bar hostess – a sort of geisha – requires her to be a sexual fantasy for men, while in reality, she’s with a woman.

She’s not exactly a prostitute, if you’re suggesting that. She has to hang around with the men and make sure they have a lot of drinks and end up shelling out a lot of money. Her job is to entertain. But when I visited these bars for research, I found that many of these girls are sick of men. They mistrust men, they hate men, and they lie to men all the time. And they find it easier to be in relationships with women.

Another interesting aspect of your film is that the homosexual relationship is shown to be the stable one, whereas the heterosexual ones (between Shalika and the married man who dumps her, or between Sandhya Rani and the husband that she dumps) are brittle and ephemeral. Is this, again, a deliberate subtext?

Not really. Sandhya Rani represents a class of people who do not marry because it could affect their career, and then end up without anyone wanting to marry them. Even Shalika, being an actress, is drawn to someone from her profession, someone always in close proximity, but it ends up an unstable relationship. It just happens that Sandhya Rani and Shalika are subconsciously searching for relationships, whereas Priya is the one who finds some sort of stability.

Finally, what has the response been like, to this very women-centric film, which is quite unlike your earlier work?

Akasa Kusum was very well received at the Pusan International Film Festival, in Korea, and also at the New York South Asian Film Festival. The women in the audience, especially, loved it and took to the character of Sandhya Rani. As for me, I’ve made films about relationships earlier, but there was always a historical or political aspect to them. This time, I wanted to move away from the war. That’s why Sandhya Rani changes channels on TV when she comes across war footage being shown. I wanted to show that other things are happening in Sri Lanka too, after the impact of globalisation, like the disintegration of family. After engaging with the environment and the society so far, this time I wanted to engage with the self.