At the heart of Sri Lankan filmmaker Suba Sivakumaran’s debut feature, House of My Fathers , lies a political conceit — war has cursed two villages, one Sri Lankan, the other Tamil, with infertility. No child has been born for years. A Sinhala soldier, Ashoka, who is fighting his own fears and guilt, and a Tamil woman, Ahalya, who has turned mute on losing her husband and son to war, journey into the Forest of the Dead to confront the past and save the future, personal as well as collective. There is a third party, Strange Doctor, who plays their mentor and mediator. Will their expedition usher in hope, healing and a new lease of life for themselves and the community?
Conscious choice
Using a mix of fantasy, fable and allegory to deal with the conflict and trauma at the heart of the civil war in Sri Lanka was a conscious choice made by Sivakumaran. No political parties, leaders or rebel groups are named.
“In South Asia, despite being an argumentative people, we have a devotional mindset to our groups and leaders. Hopefully, by doing this, the audience can experience the lives of the characters on a visceral, primitive and subconscious level, which is where all truth in stories reside,” she tells The Hindu in an email interview. Myths have been her source of inspiration and help lend a mystical, timeless touch in centering on the contemporary issue. “Ancient stories that deal with exile, memory, betrayal and the future have power because they keep recurring in our lives, and they are never resolved,” she says.
The film’s title is as metaphorical as the narrative. “It was named House of My Fathers because two fathers gave birth to the violence, and now we all live in their house,” says Sivakumaran, adding, “There is something about certain (not all) kinds of men and their desire for violence, which decimates everything around them — their families, their communities, their country.”
The story is married to a gender perspective. In a telling moment, the woman’s body ‘becomes’ the map of Sri Lanka. “Usually a woman’s body is only relevant in terms of who owns it and whether it carries honour or shame. I wanted to say that women can carry larger ideals in their bod[ies] as well; that it can represent a nation and its contested identities, that it brings forth children and has power and that it can be owned by no one other than the woman herself,” explains Sivakumaran.
A Sinhala man and a Tamil woman in the forest together, their intimacy, even though it might appear literal and simplistic at one level is also subversive at another.
We have had narratives in Bollywood where the man is from India and the woman from Pakistan. Very rarely is it the other way round. What about a Tamil man and a Sinhala woman? Sivakumaran admits to having thought about it, but the story would not have worked the same way. “It is an allegory and has to follow the events of history,” she says, “However, as more Sri Lankan films are made, hopefully we can see more interesting and diverse narratives.”
Stillness and design
Despite the simmering violence, there is a stillness and quietude in the images and deliberate design in the frames, for which she credits her director of photography Kalinga Deshapriya. It is also in step with the tradition of Sri Lankan independent cinema led by the likes of Prasanna Vithanage, Asoka Handagama and Vimukthi Jayasundara.
With a background in public policy, international development and aid work, the self-taught filmmaker first made a short film titled I Too Have a Name, and co-directed another short set in Tunisia, Africa, called L’Oiseau Bleu (Bluebird). House of My Fathers received support from the Locarno Open Doors Hub Programme and was part of the Paris Coproduction Village.
Was the idea of conflict central to them as well? According to Sivakumaran all stories anyhow have at their centre characters trying to find their truth, coming to terms with themselves, and dealing with internal conflict and the choices they have made in their lives. “I guess in I Too Have A Name this was central to the theme, against a backdrop of a wider war in which choices carry the consequences of life and death. That film was about a woman trying to find her place in a world of violence. But regardless of actual war, violence is around us all the time today,” she says.
And what of her own exposure to and engagement with conflict? Sivakumaran was born in Jaffna, and grew up mostly abroad, but it was after the 2004 tsunami that she returned to Sri Lanka for relief work. “I went up and down the country, working in over 100 Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim villages during the war, and that is when I came to know the real Sri Lanka, which lies in the heart of its villages,” she says.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
