House of My Fathers, which competed in Busan International Film Festival and BFI London
Film Festival, was recently screened in competition at the 29th Singapore International
Film Festival. The film is a mesmerising and poetic debut with a magical-realist narrative by
Sri Lankan filmmaker Suba Sivakumaran.
It is a political
allegory of Sri Lanka, where the civil war has divided two communities: the Tamil and the Sinhala. Sworn enemies since time immemorial, both villages
find their women afflicted with a curse of infertility.
As infertility plagues
the two warring Sri Lankan villages, the village chiefs are forced to confront
their pasts in order to save their future.
A vision of the gods was
given to the respective villages to send a Tamil woman and a Sinhala man to
venture together into the Forest of the Dead. In hopes of lifting the infertility
curse, a “Strange Doctor” (Steve De La Zilwa) was with them on their
journey.
Venturing into the
mythical forest, the trio tries to grasp and understand the various happenings
at different stages.
The film offers a reading
of a post-conflict society, tenderly showcasing the vulnerabilities of both
Asoka, the Sinhalese man, and Ahalya, the Tamil lady, as they find themselves
face-to-face with their fears.
Once a well-respected
soldier, Asoka (Bimal Jayakodi) is now haunted by memories of wartime.
He is revisited by his fellow soldiers who were brutally murdered, demanding
to know why he was the only one spared.
Ahalya (Pradeepa), a mute
lady due to the trauma of losing her son in the war, sees visions of her son at
every corner. Their scars from the war are deeply etched in them, resulting in
a torturous journey.
Asoka and Ahalya
seek solace in each other, yet their intimacy is not of romance. And as
expected, Ahalya soon becomes pregnant with Asoka’s child. Yet we are told from the start that the villages’ shamans predicted that only one of them would
return. This prophecy proves to be true.
Containing traces of Alfonso
Cuaron’s Children of Men, this
dystopian tale offers a social commentary of the cost involved towards building
a brighter future. Despite regaining her ability to speak, Ahalya faces the
same cycle of having her baby taken away from her.
A thought-provoking
piece, Sivakumaran ends the film with ambiguity, hinting at the possibility of a
better future for this child who born to parents from rival villages. Yet
the cynic in me believes that the cycle will repeat itself as humans time
and time again prove to be more than capable of self-destruction.
Sivakumaran is now in the early
stages of a new project, ”Children of the Atom Bomb”, a road-trip thriller set
in London about refugees escaping from inhumane immigration policies.
Written by Christine Seow