Cinema
He attended the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, India and after returning to Sri Lanka, began work on his first film, The Land of Silence (2001), a production that took 3 years to complete. The Land of Silence was a documentary in black and white about the victims of civil war in Sri Lanka. The film was made using cinematographic equipment from the 1960s and interspersed with occasional dialogues deliberately not translated but relayed by a background commentary. The film transforms images of the present into ghostly archives. The Land of Silence strips away the glory of war and puts a monochrome microscope on soldiers knocked into a mundane and dreary existence half the people they were before putting on the uniform. The documentary was selected by several festivals including Marseilles, Rotterdam and Berlin.
Following the Land of Silence, Vimukthi received a scholarship at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts from the French Government and the Sri Lanka National Film Corporation on the recommendation of Dr. Lester James Peiris and Dr. Tissa Abeysekera. . At the Le Fresnoy he studied under Tasi Ming Liang, Jean Marie-Straub, Jean Luc-Godard and Eugene Greene. Following his time at Fresnoy, he directed a short film Empty for Love – which was shot in France and Sri Lanka. The film was Produced by Lefresnoy and it was officially selected to the Cannes film festival in 2003 and it won the Best Director Award at the Novo Mesto International Short Film festival – Slovenia in 2003 at the same year he became a resident at the Cinéfondation of the Cannes Film Festival.
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“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
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