Oceans away and years ago, the civil war in Sri Lanka separated members of Rajee Samarasinghe’s family. This touching portrait brings them together again, with the filmmaker’s signature visual flair.
My mother's lost Chinese heritage was a point of departure in this film which investigates the process by which an image is constructed in places foreign from that of my own.
The Eyes of Summer was shot in the filmmaker's mother's village in southern Sri Lanka in 2010, immediately after the civil war. Together with family members, he developed an improvised story around a shy girl who becomes friends with a spirit, based on similar encounters from his mother's childhood. A story from a repressed community that doesn't seem to draw defined boundaries...
In this fascinating, disorientating look at nature and technology, a Sri Lankan woman navigates a multitude of spaces – from the physical to the digital and into the virtual plane.