Director Vimukthi Jayasundara this past May became the first Sri Lankan to ever win the prestigious Camera dÂ’Or award for Best First Film, or any award for that matter, at the world reknowned Cannes Film Festival for his Sinhalese language film Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land). Jaysundara, who was trained trained at the Institute of the Cinema and Television of Pune, in India, shares the award at Cannes with an American, Miranda July for her work, Me And You And Everyone We Know.

When asked to talk about the film, Jayasundara said,

“If The Forsaken Land has something to do with my country’s history, it is especially through its conveyance of the suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace – in between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere… For me, filmmaking is an ideal vehicle for expressing the mental stress people experience as a result of the emptiness and indecisiveness they feel in their lives. With the film, I wanted to examine emotional isolation in a world where war, peace and God have become abstract notions.”

Thankfully, getting to see this film will be made easier by his win at Cannes as his film has found distribution in the U.S and in his native Sri Lanka.

More on Jayasundara and his win here, here, here, and here.