Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land) (2005)

Along with the Russian film, 4, this is probably the strongest film in competition at the World Film Festival of Bangkok. The director Vimukthi Jayasundara was present for a Q&A afterward, but I'd pretty well already made up my mind about the film. The action centers on one family, living in a desolate, sand-swept plain of Sri Lanka. Their boring, soul-crushing days are punctuated by encounters with the military. In the mornings, a tank rolls by. One day, while the man is on the job as a security guard, he's picked up by a troop truck, stripped of his clothes and left naked in a river, I guess for no reason other than the troops are bored. See, Sri Lanka has been in a state of civil war for the past three decades or so. There is neither declared peace or war. So everyone lives pretty much in fear. As a result, society has broken down, at least in the story presented in this film. The man lives with his pretty young wife and his sister. The sister rides the bus each day to work, while the man works as a guard and the young wife hangs about. She's ripe for the picking, as a local soldier finds out. There's also a little girl that hangs around. And an old man, who's also supposed to be a security guard but basically does nothing but drink, swim naked and tell the story about "Little Bird", a woman whose family was poor and could only give her a cup of rice for her dowry. The sister is desparate for a way out of this village, and she urges her brother to leave the area. As depressing as it all is, it's beautifully filmed, and even erotic at times, though the eroticism only illustrates that morals have completely gone out the window here. The filmmaker had the cooperation of the military to make his film (hence the use of the tank and troop trucks), but once it was shown, it seems things changed politically and the military didn't like the way it was portrayed. The film was banned in Sri Lanka and the director has left his home country to live in France, where he studied filmmaking. I think he was taking chance getting as close as Thailand, and indeed there were three Sri Lankans who had some strong words for him waiting for the Q&A session afterward. But they had only questions. And, after all, the film was only his opinion.