Rajee Samarasinghe

The Eyes of Summer

Rajee Samarasinghe

Shalani Dilasha, Malka Malshani

In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother's village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. 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, and foreign influences loom over Sri Lanka’s commercial, economic, and media infrastructure.

everyday star

Rajee Samarasinghe

Paige McGhee, Bobbi Yost

Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.

The Spectre Watches Over Her

Rajee Samarasinghe

A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz, Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this silent, high contrast, hand-processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. The filmmakers restages a Sanni Yakuma healing ritual that was performed over a 12-hour period.

Show Me Other Places

Rajee Samarasinghe

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself. Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker.

The Queen of Material

Rajee Samarasinghe

Delini Samarasinghe

A short procession of colorful material and a mysterious woman lit by the sun. A paean to Kenneth Anger.

the past

Rajee Samarasinghe

Two people mourn an unsaid tragedy in this silent play in cinematic narrativity and melodrama, telling an elegiac tale in portraiture.

FOREIGN QUARTERS

Rajee Samarasinghe

The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of my mother’s past and persona.

Misery Next Time

Rajee Samarasinghe

This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.

If I Were Any Further Away I'd Be Closer to Home

Rajee Samarasinghe

A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother's birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian "makers" becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

black widow summer set

Rajee Samarasinghe

Crossing shadowed planes, our bodies return to the ocean. An elegiac tale of the high seas.

Untitled

Rajee Samarasinghe

A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption. This piece continues a series of cinematic works finding the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media as a means to dismantle hegemonic structures found in the culture of image consumption.

The Exile (Pituvahalaya)

Rajee Samarasinghe

Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.

ජීවිතයේ මායාව

Rajee Samarasinghe

Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film Reassemblage, this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance through a curious telescopic lens.