Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

As many as 100,000 people, predominantly members of the minority Tamil community, are estimated to have disappeared during the 26-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Through a unique synthesis of interviews, news clips and re-enactments this docufiction reflects on this harrowing history as families search for loved ones that disappeared without a trace.

Prominent among the many unspeakable atrocities marking the 26-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka is the phenomenon of enforced disappearances at the hands of military forces. Estimates suggest that up to 100,000 people, mostly members of the minority Tamil community, may have disappeared since the eighties. Fifteen years after the end of the war in 2009, families are still looking for their vanished loved ones. 

In his debut feature Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe reflects on this harrowing history through a combination of direct interviews, newsclips, dramatic re-enactments and abstract, symbolically coded tableaux. Heartrending testimonies of grieving mothers are interwoven with sparse fictional vignettes produced in collaboration with members of the Tamil community. 

The film’s episodic construction advances a set of propositions around a spectral void, namely the absent bodies of those who are missing. This otherworldly quality is reinforced by present-day drone footage of war-torn areas, seemingly idyllic and scar-free, that has the texture of an alien incursion. Shot in challenging conditions by means of subversion and subterfuge, Samarasinghe’s film presents a singular, compelling reflection on crime and bereavement. 

– Srikanth Srinivasan

> Country of production: Sri Lanka, United States

Trailer

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