A film by Theena Kumaragurunathan. Produced by Malaka Talwatte. Sri Lanka, 2023. Sinhala with English subtitles, 90 minutes.
Pala is a feature documentary on the contemporary artist Pala Pothupitiye. He was born in Deniyaya, in the deep south, into a family of traditional healers and craftsmen, and the film takes the form of a cinematic thovil, the healing ritual he inherited from his father and grand-uncle, to tell the story of an artist who carried that inheritance into the galleries the craft was once kept outside.
Rather than narrate the work from a distance, the film moves the way the ceremony does, through sound, movement and image, so that the art and the world it came from are held together. Across its ninety minutes it reaches the work he is known for: the government survey sheets and old colonial charts he cuts and redraws until the authority of the printed map gives way to the country beneath it, and the questions of caste, war and the power to name a place that his art keeps reopening.
The film was directed, edited and co-written by Theena Kumaragurunathan, the novelist and filmmaker whose First Utterance won Sri Lanka’s National Literary Award, with cinematography by Striner Adams and a score by Isuru Kumarasinghe. It features Pala Pothupitiye and Priyanthi Anusha, and had its London screening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2024.
More about the film at IMDb, and on the director’s page.
How to cite this page
Malaka Talwatte, “Pala,” Malaka Talwatte: Sri Lankan Art and Ceylon Antiquaria, https://malakatalwatte.pages.dev/publications/pala/.