Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe has been making exquisite short films for the past several years, works that hold out the suggestion of narrative meaning but are often more focused on the particulars of light and landscape in Sri Lanka. With his feature debut, Samarasinghe has produced something rather different. Your Touch Makes Others Invisible is both a documentary about forced disappearances during the government’s 30-year-long war against the Tamil Tiger separatists, and a hushed, often nonverbal tone poem on the themes of mourning, trauma, and absence.
If those last three nouns seem familiar in film critical discourse, it’s probably because they have been prime movers in the last two decades of international cinema. Trauma has become a touchstone for artists to explore the intersection of personal and historical meaning, the ways that both individual and national psyches negotiate the horrors of late modernity. From Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Lav Diaz to Lisandro Alonso and Kamila Andini, directors have committed themselves to plumbing the psychological scars of genocide as well as the physical traces left on the land itself.
In other words, Samarasinghe’s film speaks the contemporary lingua franca of modern art cinema. This observation is by no means a criticism of Your Touch; it merely notes that some of its more oblique elements may have a clearer interpretation than the filmmaker might expect. In an opening text, Samarasinghe explains to the viewer that the film represents his first exploration of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers’ former stronghold and a place Sinhalese Sri Lankans seldom venture into unless they were part of the invading military. We hear direct testimony from one woman who appears throughout the film, sounding a refrain of maternal loss. Her son was kidnapped by soldiers years ago, and she continues to believe that he is alive somewhere, and that she may one day meet him by chance. While other interviewees speak of their need for closure, this mother seems intent on ripping the scabs off every day, holding her pain as a self-destructive gesture of hope.
Passages of direct address alternate with more direct, poetic imagery: a young girl bleeding profusely from the mouth, or religious rituals involving fire and the mortification of the flesh. Other segments emphasize apparent normalcy: a girl eating a popsicle in a country store, or soldiers raising their guns at children in the forest. Samarasinghe frequently uses drone shots to display the bustling market streets and semi-suburban arrangement of homes, suggesting that the recent horrors have been erased from everyday life even as they are palpably present.
There is an odd formal refusal at work throughout Your Touch Makes Others Invisible. The film toggles between the quotidian and the mysterious, the abstract and the explicit, never quite achieving synthesis. While this could be read as a growing pain of Samarasinghe’s expansion into feature length, one could also reasonably see it as a strategy of disruption. History and its blatant suppression sit side by side, refusing to cohere. This is a film of conflicting tendencies, and as viewers find themselves incapable of arriving at a definitive historical meaning, so too are the Sri Lankan people stranded in a suspended state of historical meaning. The film, then, treats montage as an open wound, two ends of a single flesh that cannot heal.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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