Roxy Cinema, Renton -- Sun, Nov 9th -- 4:00 pm

Sri Lanka / 2012 / 90 min

Director: Prasanna Vithanage
Sinhala / Tamil with English subtitles 

Born in 1962, Prasanna Vithanage’s opus of six previous films has made him one of Sri Lanka ’s leading filmmakers with a worldwide critical and popular reputation. He began his career in the 1980’s as a theatre director. He translated into Sinhala and directed two plays before setting out as a filmmaker in 1992. His fourth feature “Purahanda Kaluwara” (Death on a Full Moon Day 1997) won the Grand Prix at the Amiens Film Festival. While also devoting serious time and effort to the education and training of young people in the art and business of filmmaking, Vithanage revisited theatre in time spent between making movies. In 2008 Prasanna produced the hit comedy “Machan”, an international co-production, directed by Uberto Pasolini. “Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka” (With You, Without You) is his seventh feature.

Director's Note: Why did I make “With You, Without You”? When I was reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella “The Meek One” over and over again, two things plunged into my mind. One, is its probe into masculinity, and second is questioning how the consumerist values deprive people of human connection. When adapting this novella into a film, I based this upon the biggest issue of our country which is the ethnic conflict. We live in a society which still has unhealed wounds from a war that lasted over thirty years, killing over tens of thousands of people. Confrontation of a man from the majority Sinhalese and a woman from the Tamil minority became the dramatic premise of my script. Their struggle with their own past for me was a metaphor for the struggles of the nation as a whole.

 Links

• http://withyouwithoutyou.com/?page_id=55
• http://www.vithanage.com/
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274706/