Just as effortlessly as vile racist words fall out of their mouths, they are also invited politely for a cup of tea. Similarly, it came through in the interaction between the Tamil grandmother and the Sinhala parents of Anil Jayasinghe, the lover of Ratha aunty. Two poignant examples of that were the scenes in the school where a group of Sinhala boys were bullying a Tamil boy, while the main protagonist Arji (who barely escaped the same fate in the school toilet) and Shehan (soon to become his lover), converse in elocuted English about this heavily normalized incident. All of this came through powerfully in the film. Simultaneously, we noted the portrayal of the everydayness of racism, slowly but surely, getting entangled with the contours of class privilege and colonial ways of being colonial ways that are internalized in this section of Sri Lankan society as oneвЂ™s вЂњown cultureвЂќ. As we watched the film we had conversations in amazement about how it was possible, as late as the early 1980s, for families to live such ostentatious life styles and in palatial colonial homes. The culture of elite boysвЂ™ schools where you refer to each other through surnames still continues. But we will return to this later.ДЇor myself, the post-colonial school system, English novels and theatre, tennis courts, dinner outings on the beach, live bands and meals at clubs were familiar of elite Colombo life. Those years had altered many of us in fundamental ways.Д®ven as we were moved, all of us, depending on our different relationships, knowledge and attachment to the Tamil language were appalled and had to simply ignore or try our hardest to give the benefit of doubt about the incomprehensible dubbing for almost all characters who uttered sentences and words in Tamil intermittently. Everyone could connect to the feelings evoked in the film as it moved through those years and it left us silent in our own memories and buried feelings. We spoke of family and friends leaving the country after their houses were destroyed in 1983. We spoke of family members and ourselves being caught in the different violent incidents and riots pictured in the film. Both times the film took us to our own memories of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first time we watched it was with my daughter, aged 14 and the second time on January 1 with a small group of friends in Batticaloa, all of whom had lived through the war and worked tirelessly as peace activists. We were surrounded by the numerous debates and controversies about the film. We watched the film, Funny Boy, directed by Deepa Mehta and adapted from Shyam SelvaduraiвЂ™s 1994 novel, twice.

Funny sinhala movies