The Eyes of Summer (Gimhanaye Netra)
ABOUT
Collaboratively developed with members of my family, shortly after the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2010, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the village where she grew up. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.
Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka currently based in the United States. He received his BFA from UCSD and his MFA from CalArts. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war—the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019 and was invited to Berlinale Talents' Doc Station as well as True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020. Rajee's work has been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films, BFI London, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival etc. He also recently received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
CREDITS
Delini Malka Samarasinghe
Rajee Samarasinghe