Rajee Samarasinghe
Birth : 1988-01-12, Colombo, Sri Lanka
History
Rajee Samarasinghe (b. 1988) is an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Sri Lanka. His work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. Rajee received his BFA from the University of California San Diego in 2010 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2016. He is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war—the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant.
Rajee's work has been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, REDCAT, Media City Film Festival, Message to Man, Havana Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Internationales Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, & Chicago Underground Film Festival, among many others. He's received the "Film House Award for visionary filmmaking" at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, an "Audience Award" at CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, and a "Jury Award" at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.
Director
A haunting collage of pomegranate arils, rural and urban landscapes, family history and mandalas undulate at a crossroads between death and longing. Inspired by the love poem Caurapañcāśikā by Bilhana, Lotus-Eyed Girl unfurls the impacts of colonialism on human desire with a pulsating, ambient eeriness.
Director
This footage was shot shortly after the civil war in Sri Lanka on the occasion of my mother’s long-delayed reunion with Kamala, the aunt she lived with as a child. Kamala was living a life of solitude at this point and has now since passed away—this film is dedicated to her.
Special Effects
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.
Production Design
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.
Editor
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.
Cinematography
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.
Producer
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.
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
Two people mourn an unsaid tragedy in this silent play in cinematic narrativity and melodrama, telling an elegiac tale in portraiture.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Assistant Camera
A struggling black college grad wakes up to find that reparations have finally been paid to descendants of slaves in America. With this new found capital, they will decide how best to spend their reparations, totaling a mere $16,000. Receiving reparations opens up old wounds of slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic oppression.
Editor
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.
Director of Photography
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.
Original Music Composer
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.
Producer
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.
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Screenplay
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of my mother’s past and persona.
Director
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.
Director
Crossing shadowed planes, our bodies return to the ocean. An elegiac tale of the high seas.
Director
A short procession of colorful material and a mysterious woman lit by the sun. A paean to Kenneth Anger.
Director
A short film by Rajee Samarasinghe
