CSAS Lecture Series | Demons in Paradise Film Screening
Jude Ratnam, Filmmaker & V.V. Ganeshananthan, University of Minnesota
Sri Lanka 1983, Jude Ratnam is five years old. On a red train, he flees the massacre of the Tamils instigated by the Pro-Sinhalese majoritarian government. Now a filmmaker, he takes the same train from South to North.
As he advances, the traces of the violence of the 26-year-old war and the one which turned the Tamil's fight for freedom into a self-destructive terrorism pass before his eyes.
Reminiscing the hidden souvenirs of fighters and Tamil Tigers, he unveils the repressed memories of his compatriots, opening the door to a new era and making peace possible again.
DEMONS IN PARADISE is the result of ten years of work. For the first time, a Tamil documentary filmmaker living in Sri Lanka is seeing the Civil war from the inside.
Jude Ratnam worked for an NGO before becoming a filmmaker. He obtained a degree in sociology and psychology from the University of Kamaraj in southern India, before studying cinema at the School of Media Art and Managment in Sri Lanka. In 2006, he left his post at the NGO, no longer able to bear the hypocrisy of a job consisting in preaching reconciliation while civil war still raged, and the country was violently divided and impoverished. He spent months thinking about how to reach the greatest number of people in an intimate yet political way. How could he tap into the emotions as well as the minds of his compatriots? His love for cinema suddenly made it seem obvious: He had to make films. It was this intuition that gave him the courage to commit to a project for 10 years, despite the risks involved. He trained and had the backing of a French team (his co-writer Isabelle Marina introduced him to the producer Julie Paratian), along with some Tamil and Sinhalese partners, since his aim was to put into practice a dialog of reconciliation during the actual shoot. On his way, he met some key gures who each, in their own way, gave him the strength to carry on: Tue Steen Muller, director of European Documentary Network; Ally Derks of the IDFA BERTHA FUND; Raoul Peck, president of the Fémis film school, when he attended the ARCHIDOC workshop; director Rithy Panh, his inspiration; the founder of ARTE’s Documentary Unit, Thierry Garrel; and Christian Jeune and Thierry Frémaux, who selected his film for the Festival de Cannes. Jude Ratnam is also a film critic and cofounder of the Colombo Film Circle, and manager of the KRITI-A Work of Art production company, which coproduced Demons In Paradise. He is currently working on some new film projects in Sri Lanka.
V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008). The novel, which is set in Sri Lanka and some of its diaspora communities, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Himal Southasian, and The American Prospect, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is a contributing editor for Copper Nickel and Jaggery, a founding member of Lanka Solidarity, and a member of the board of directors of The American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others, she is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014. She is on the board of the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies, and is a founding member of Lanka Solidarity. In 2014, she concluded a five-year stint as the Delbanco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2015, she began teaching in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
As he advances, the traces of the violence of the 26-year-old war and the one which turned the Tamil's fight for freedom into a self-destructive terrorism pass before his eyes.
Reminiscing the hidden souvenirs of fighters and Tamil Tigers, he unveils the repressed memories of his compatriots, opening the door to a new era and making peace possible again.
DEMONS IN PARADISE is the result of ten years of work. For the first time, a Tamil documentary filmmaker living in Sri Lanka is seeing the Civil war from the inside.
Jude Ratnam worked for an NGO before becoming a filmmaker. He obtained a degree in sociology and psychology from the University of Kamaraj in southern India, before studying cinema at the School of Media Art and Managment in Sri Lanka. In 2006, he left his post at the NGO, no longer able to bear the hypocrisy of a job consisting in preaching reconciliation while civil war still raged, and the country was violently divided and impoverished. He spent months thinking about how to reach the greatest number of people in an intimate yet political way. How could he tap into the emotions as well as the minds of his compatriots? His love for cinema suddenly made it seem obvious: He had to make films. It was this intuition that gave him the courage to commit to a project for 10 years, despite the risks involved. He trained and had the backing of a French team (his co-writer Isabelle Marina introduced him to the producer Julie Paratian), along with some Tamil and Sinhalese partners, since his aim was to put into practice a dialog of reconciliation during the actual shoot. On his way, he met some key gures who each, in their own way, gave him the strength to carry on: Tue Steen Muller, director of European Documentary Network; Ally Derks of the IDFA BERTHA FUND; Raoul Peck, president of the Fémis film school, when he attended the ARCHIDOC workshop; director Rithy Panh, his inspiration; the founder of ARTE’s Documentary Unit, Thierry Garrel; and Christian Jeune and Thierry Frémaux, who selected his film for the Festival de Cannes. Jude Ratnam is also a film critic and cofounder of the Colombo Film Circle, and manager of the KRITI-A Work of Art production company, which coproduced Demons In Paradise. He is currently working on some new film projects in Sri Lanka.
V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008). The novel, which is set in Sri Lanka and some of its diaspora communities, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Himal Southasian, and The American Prospect, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is a contributing editor for Copper Nickel and Jaggery, a founding member of Lanka Solidarity, and a member of the board of directors of The American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others, she is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014. She is on the board of the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies, and is a founding member of Lanka Solidarity. In 2014, she concluded a five-year stint as the Delbanco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2015, she began teaching in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
| Building: | North Quad |
|---|---|
| Event Type: | Film Screening |
| Tags: | Asia, Film |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from Center for South Asian Studies, International Institute, Asian Languages and Cultures |
