Vimukthi Jayasundara - Early Life

Early Life

His father was a Science Teacher and Vimukthi’s early move to Galle was a result of his parents temporarily separating, thereby forcing him to live with his grandmother. But a wave of ethnic unrest, destruction, bloodshed and chaos shrouded the country in darkness. Starting with the Black July Massacre in ’83 and going up to the JVP Insurrection in ’89, the entire country descended into pandemonium and this disrupted daily life the island-over.

The riots were especially prominent in Galle, being a Southern JVP stronghold and to get away from the violence, Vimukthi would escape into the tranquillity of the forests and wander around by himself. And when not doing that, he would hold up in the house and passionately delve into books. This passage of time was the anvil on which many elements we see in his films were forged.

Reading led him to thinking and this led to an insatiable interest in media. To quench this thirst, Vimukthi journeyed to Colombo every weekend, to attend a class for a Diploma in Journalism, which was the only one of its kind at the time. At this point, he was still in school and had to lie about his age to be eligible to enrol in the diploma program. During this time, he volunteered for a Marxist print publication called Hiru where he mainly wrote on cinema and art.

He spent of lot of time walking around Colombo, going from cultural centre to cultural centre watching whatever films that we being screened and it was at this point, he landed his first job at Lowe Lintas Worldwide, an advertising agency.