ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka's Black Cinema, a genre of the Sinhala-language cinema that emerged during the early 2000s, exposes the militarization of everyday life and wartime corruption. This chapter scrutinizes the spatial effects that convey gendered figurations of disempowerment due to wartime violence in Sri Lanka. It also explores how utopic representations of home, city and nation gave way to indeterminate interstitial spatialities, transforming the cinematic genre through Black Cinema's critical lens. This journey away from nationalistic representations is best expressed in a small coterie of Tamil and Sinhala films, which although conservative, explore critical sociospatial transformations. Award-winning Tamil films by Indian filmmakers Mani Ratnam and Santosh Sivan have also explored the Sri Lankan conflict, focusing on the female combatant as a cultural enigma. Yet, as evident in theatrical portrayals of Antigone, explored in this chapter, the choice of death over other forms of civic morality, antithetical to the Tamil community's struggle for survival, is often confounding to audiences.
