Features

“Vaishnavee”:Sumitra’s swansong

Published

2 years ago

2023/12/8

Thilina Walpola

Sumithra with Donald

By Uditha Devapriya

On Tuesday, December 5, the French Embassy screened Vaishnavee at the National Film Corporation, the last in a series of cultural items commemorating the 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties between France and Sri Lanka. The finale was, to put it rather mildly, a fitting one. Peries epitomised Sri Lanka’s French connection in ways few of her contemporaries did. A Francophone and a Francophile, she represented the country there in the late 1990s. As a student in the 1950s, she found herself stranded in Paris, before being whisked off to the French Legation, headed then by Vernon Mendis. It was there that she met Lester Peries and there that she saw her first real Sinhala film, Rekava.

That French connection was revived on Tuesday evening. Yet though it was a fitting finale, it was also a sombre one. Peries’s passing, to borrow an oft-quoted cliché, represents not the passing but an end of an era, an era that began its descent with the passing of her husband in 2018. It was in that year that Vaishnavee was first screened publicly in Sri Lanka.

Based, as the titles inform us, on a story by Lester, Vaishnavee represents Sumitra, if not at her finest, then at her most characteristic. Like Ray, Antonioni, and Kurosawa, Sumitra’s last film is a celebration of innocence, not a mere reflection on serious themes. Watching it for the first time in 2017, I went back to Pauline Kael’s review of Ghare Baire.

The main characters talk, and the camera just stays on them and waits until they finish, yet these conversations develop a heart-swelling intensity. In a scene, the method is like that of amateur moviemakers who think that all they need to do is put actors in a room and photograph them reading their lines as if they were on a stage. The difference is that Satyajit Ray… didn’t start with this simplicity – he achieved it.

It would be anachronistic to apply this to Vaishnavee, a film which unfolds in a different world and universe, a different time. But like Satyajit Ray in 1984, Sumitra had by the time of her last film been making movies for 30 years, and another 10 years as an editor, mostly for her husband but for other directors as well. Vaishnavee is full of sequences that seemingly go nowhere: a kindly uncle talks about the future with his orphaned nephew; the nephew’s fiancée elopes with a man we never hear of again; the jilted lover is then taken to another prospective bride, who turns out to be a disappointment. These are of peripheral interest to the larger storyline. But they are intriguing enough to hold on their own.

Reviewing Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell wrote of a poem, that “there are faults in this passage, and they do not matter.” There are enough and more faults in Sumitra’s film. These, however, do not really diminish the story: rather, they add to it. As I noted in my first review in 2017, the conclusion bothers me somewhat: it is trying to tell us something about the eternalness of love, about the fact that love should never be taken for granted.

But the Pygmalionesque overtones (or undertones) of the narrative outweigh everything in the story. This is not to demean Yashodha Wimaladharma’s performance. But the ending is full of ambiguity which cannot be reconciled with the rest of the film.

Manoratne and Mahendra Perera

The Sumitra Peries film that Vaishnavee evokes best in this regard is Sakman Maluwa. There too, love is expressed ambivalently, and feelings of jealousy crop up sporadically, until in the end the characters reach a catharsis when the wife tells the husband that only he can bridge the gap which has slowly sprung up between them. In Vaishnavee there is no bridge: the puppet, after her metamorphosis, turns the tables on the protagonist by making it clear that she will not be taken for granted, not even by the person who gave her life.

When I went to its first screening in 2017, I was asked to bring my mother along. “She will appreciate it better, I think,” Sumitra suggested. I saw her point at once: Vaishnavee recalls a tradition of filmmaking that has all but completely been lost. Yet the message in the story is relevant for all time, and I believe it resonates particularly sharply with the younger crowd as well: particularly the women, who would notice how deftly the director has subverted the traditional Pygmalionesque outlines of the story.

In Shaw’s play, the flower girl, taught to be a lady, laments that she can’t be anyone other than a lady. She realises the limits of her new situation but can’t do anything about it. In Vaishnavee on the other hand the puppet that is brought alive refuses to be confined this way. She turns the tables on her creator: instead of being grateful to him for giving her life, she haunts him and his family.

This does not make the woman a neurotic Glenn Close type who will go to any length to have the man who happened to give her life. There are, to be sure, times when one feels that she is taking things too far, especially when she haunts the protagonist’s cousin. But even when the likes of Rohana Beddage rally around and try to exorcise her spirit from their home, even when the protagonist – played, by the way, by an impeccable and pre-Koombiyo Thumindu Dodantanne – you understand where she is coming from and why she is acting as she is. She doesn’t feel wronged, but slighted. Though we don’t see everything from her point of view – unlike, say, Maleficent, which revisits the Sleeping Beauty story from the perspective of the “wicked fairy” – we understand her motives, especially in the conclusion, where she cautions the man against taking love for granted.

To be sure, the fault isn’t the man’s. He clearly loves this woman, but he can’t bring himself to do so, because his world is not hers. But in another film, the woman would have made the hard yards to prove herself worthy of the man. This is not that movie.

Instead the woman makes it clear that she cannot be dismissed, that the man cannot call the shots over her. One can consider Vaishnavee a feminist work in that regard: the director, rather than sticking to the traditional girl-hankers-after-boy arc, chooses to subvert it.

This is hardly surprising. Sumitra’s films have always been about women refusing to be who they are defined as being by the rest of the world. From Vasanthi Chathurani in Gehenu Lamayi to Swarna Mallawarachchi in Sagara Jalaya, to Geetha Kumarasinghe in Loku Duwa, there is an incipient rebelliousness in her women. Sometimes they manage to rise above their situation, often they don’t. What Sumitra does in Vaishnavee is to add a supernatural twist to this theme, and bring it up to date for newer, younger audiences.

Much has been written about Vaishnavee’s “magic realist” qualities. Magical realism is defined as a mode of art which depicts a realistic picture of the world while adding or incorporating magical elements. There is here a near-complete erasure of the line between these two elements.

To the extent that it incorporates realistic settings and magical aspects, Vaishnavee is, in that sense, magic realist. Moreover, in a story springing with special effects, the realist elements themselves occupy another world. The talking parrot, for instance, is very much “real”, but it is also somewhat otherworldly. Yashoda’s character is another case in point: even after entering our world, she retains her supernatural elan.

Other Sinhala films have tried, though not always successfully, to bridge the gap between magic and realism. One invariably recalls Udayakantha Warnasuriya’s Ran Kevita and Ran Kevita 2. Yet these were children’s films, which brimmed with an innocence that could easily be squared with the simpleness of their themes. Sumitra’s film, on the other hand, is not an innocent film, though it too brims with innocence.

One may be taken in by its old-world charms – in a film that evokes birth and rebirth from start to finish, in only one scene is there a real hint of death, the protagonist’s attempt to cut his wrist after learning of his fiancée’s elopement – but there is a profoundly serious theme hidden beneath. The supernatural occurrences, in that regard, are not cosmetic: they grow out of the puppet’s feelings for the protagonist, and the protagonist’s unwillingness to reciprocate them.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at . udakdev1@gmail.com.

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

22 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

22 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

22 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.