Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025)
Sri Lanka | 69 min |  View Trailer

Sri Lanka ranks among the highest in the number of enforced disappearances in the world and most of the disappeared are Tamils. Fusing allegorical magic realism and investigative documentary and made collaboratively with impacted locals clandestinely in a region still occupied by the military, this film is a lyrical examination of these missing persons through 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. The nonfiction elements in this film are structured by a fictional narrative thread which tells the surreal tale of a mother who loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community—a nod to the actual disappearances in the region.

Past Screenings: 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam, 41st Film Independent Spirit Awards (Winner of Truer Than Fiction Award)


A Flower Falling Back Into Earth (2025)
Sri Lanka | 8 min | Californian Premiere

This film emerged from footage originally captured for a feature documentary on enforced disappearances among Sri Lanka’s Tamil population—specifically, an interview with a mother whose son vanished in the war’s final stages. In revisiting this footage, I also revisit the challenges of representing this particular testimony, which eluded me, one that could not be fully conveyed within the framework of the original film. This iteration reshapes the original context, exploring the divide between me and her, the intersection of ethnographic and colonial perspectives, and questioning cinema’s ability to bear witness. Through silence, rupture, and absence, the film attends not only to what can be shown, but to what remains unreachable, withheld, or lost. The text read in the film was sourced from Robert Gardner’s memoir, "The Impulse to Preserve."

Past Screenings: 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

---