Violence is not something that is always as bloody as what we saw, it also happens on the level of their very existence, on what they describe as their identity. So the book is about these three and their journeys living in Sri Lanka and trying to stay, because they do love being there, but it’s hard to be in a place where your identity is always contested. He’s disappeared, and I didn’t meet him because he was not traceable when I first heard about him, and so I interviewed his mother, Indra, who is the third person. Another is a person who was disappeared, kidnapped from the streets of Colombo, that beautiful city with the coastline that we saw in these pictures. By the time I met Mugil she was the mother of two young boys and she’d been through situations quite similar to what we saw today in Callum’s film. Three people: one is a former combatant who was recruited as a child soldier in the Tamil Tigers. Not just at the end of the war, but all their lives, as they emerged into what the country calls “a peaceful situation”. Rohini Mohan: I went first in 2009, after the end of the war, so the visuals that we saw in the film today were not things that I witnessed, but I met lots of people and talked with them about what they experienced, and I focused on three of those people, still in Sri Lanka, and what they experienced living during the end of the war, and also what they are still going through living in Sri Lanka as survivors, as minorities, as people who have undergone a lot of trauma but need to move on.
The conversation has been edited for length. Mohan and Macrae spoke just before the elections about the waning days of the conflict, the difficulty of telling the story of the Tamil Tigers, and what journalists can do to contribute to post-war justice. It is unclear to what extent president-elect Maithripala Sirisena will end this repression, though he had pledged not to prosecute Rajapaska for war crimes on the campaign trail. Mohan’s new book, The Seasons of Trouble, follows three Tamils in the the last years of the war and its aftermath, while Macrae’s feature documentary “ No Fire Zone” focuses in on the bloody final weeks of the conflict, in which over 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed.īoth trace a history that the regime of president Mahinda Rajapaska-who ruled Sri Lanka from 2005 until a surprising electoral loss this January-has tried to repress through censorship, slander and violence. The war, fought between the insurgent Tamil Tigers, who aimed to establish an independent state for the country’s Tamil minority, and the Sri Lankan army, mostly made up of the country’s Sinhalese majority, ended in 2009. I’m making nu-soul, R&B music, and I’m a brown-skinned woman.Last month at Union Docs in Brooklyn, journalist Rohini Mohan and documentary filmmaker Calum Macrae sat down to discuss their respective works on the end and aftermath of the twenty-five year civil war in Sri Lanka. “I just thought, that isn’t possible here in Switzerland-you never hear about anyone breaking out internationally. Gallen, the city she grew up in after her Tamil parents were forced to flee Sri Lanka during the civil war of the 1970s. “It took a lot of time, because becoming a musician or a singer didn’t seem realistic,” Ragu says over Zoom from St. Stranger still to know that, as recently as last summer, the 35-year-old Ragu could be found working an office job in Switzerland. It’s strange to see such a confident and cohesive presence, both sonically and visually, establish itself on the music scene so quickly. Then, there’s her most recent single, “Lockdown,” featuring joyous marimbas over a thumping beat while Ragu croons for her COVID-era lover to stay the night, throwing shapes in a playfully oversized white suit. Her follow-up, “Chicken Lemon Rice”-a reference to a classic South Indian dish served up as a winking nod to her heritage-leans into experimental R&B, its video starring Ragu and her backing dancers in kaleidoscopic riffs on streetwear draped with traditional pooja garlands and colorful pom-poms. There’s her first, “Good Love 2.0,” which landed on blogs and music sites with its wonky, effervescent synths and bouncy bassline seemingly out of nowhere last October.
To watch any of the music videos Priya Ragu has released over the past year is to witness a preternatural pop talent arrive fully formed.
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