End of Battle

Director / Director of photography / Sound Suranga D. Katugampala
Concept / Script Darshana V. Aravinda
Research Judith Mitchel Hapuarachchige Dona
Edit Pierre-Yves Jouette

Produced by
Kaiya Collective (Sri Lanka)
5e6 Film (Italy)
supermouch film (France)

Swarna is the name of a woman who has returned to Sri Lanka after many years of working abroad. Swarna is also the name of a star of Sinhala popular cinema. Between the everyday life of an ordinary woman and the echo of a popular cinematic imaginary, the film follows the persistence of a desire: to inhabit, even if only for a moment, the image of another life.

Director notes

නළු නිළිය නොමැත.
(ඔවුන්ව අධ්‍යක්ෂණය කිරීමක් නොමැත).
චරිත නොමැත.
(චරිතයෙන් දැන ගැනීමට දෙයක් නොමැත).
සැකසීමක් නොමැත.
නමුත් අනුරූ සමඟ වැඩකිරීමෙන් ජීවිතයෙන් යමක් ලබා ගන්න.
රඟ පෑම වෙනුවට, හුදෙක් පවතින්න

Director's notes

End of Battle was born from the desire to approach, through cinema, an imaginary and a human landscape that I had long known only from a distance. My relationship with Sri Lanka was shaped first and foremost through images, stories, and cinematic forms. It was not about recovering an origin, but about searching for a possible relationship with a history, with bodies, with traces.
Over time, this gaze turned toward popular cinema, which more than any other seemed capable of holding together emotional intensity and social tension. In this cinema, melodrama is not just a narrative code, but a way of organizing life. Emotions are not reduced or contained, but pushed to their limits: love, loss, sacrifice, separation become the point where individual life intersects with family, social class, labor, and the relationship to land. It is a cinema in which feelings do not conceal reality, but make it more visible.
Meeting Swarna gave the film its direction. Her connection to Sinhala popular cinema and her unfulfilled desire to become an actress showed me where to begin. End of Battle does not attempt to tell her whole life, but moves within a desire that has remained open, trying to set it in motion again.
With Aravinda D. Vidya, we looked for an essential form, one that could remain close to people and places. We lived in the village for several months and shot the film on our own, just the two of us, choosing a light dispositif that would leave room for time, listening, and the unexpected.
Through Swarna, I also encountered the cinema of Sena Samarasinha, in particular Chanchala Rekha. Those images entered the film not as quotation, but as a living presence, to the point where the boundary between cinematic memory and lived experience became uncertain.
The film thus took the shape of an intimate fragment traversed by contemporary Sri Lanka: rain, construction sites, rice fields, a country in transformation, and a woman who continues to measure herself against an image of herself that was never fulfilled. Rather than explaining, I was interested in staying close to this movement.