More information on:
https://www.asokahandagama.fr
https://www.facebook.com/heliotropefilms

and the site of the ACID:
https://www.lacid.org//film-support/ini-ad-one-who-comes

Served by a remarkable image and finesse of interpretation, with a special mention for Dharshen Dharmaraj who plays the main character, Ini Avan sucks us in his quest for identity by successfully balancing the seriousness of his subject with humor and tenderness unexpected. An atmosphere that owes much to the other major film role, a Tamil survivor whose history could not hold the status of victim but by his stubbornness and his playfulness offers a way as subtle and unexpected. ”

Frédéric Ramade filmmaker ACID

“The developer of the film, the cornerstone that switches the narrative to a new freedom, even if it is full of pitfalls, it is the arrival of the woman guard sacked (…). I like the idea of ​​this young woman filmed aboard plane in the background and blew part of its determination. If the movie has a geography, its strength comes when crossing borders to address the depths of our humanity. Ini Avan and produced this moment of grace with a few plans that remain etched in our memory, placing Asoka Handagama as a filmmaker of our time. ”

Daisy Lamothe, director ACID

PRESS

“Why this woman (…) belonging to this refugee population without hearth or home, as she laughed, one is tempted to ask? This itself gives the answer, clear, to the hero: “We’re not dead, let us live.” The reason seems to have, in fact, explain a lot of things in this film at least unusual, which gradually withdraws from chronic fable. His narrative cut with panache that separates into two distinct stories, its mixture of tragedy and fantasy, melancholy and humor, and to the great plastic beauty of its staging, both economical and frontal stripped and sensual, who boldly asserts its right. This is the very power of art: transforming a reality that is foreign to us in the form that touches us intimately. ”

Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde

 

“Do not miss the opportunity to discover one who returns Asoka Handagama that Acid was presented at Cannes in 2012. Because the Sri Lankan cinema is little known in France, and because qu’Asoka Handagama is certainly one of the most remarkable representatives will, under this new film, his eighth feature film, and because of issues it addresses and representations it offers (…). Despite its lack of resources and sometimes through this economy, one which comes deployed through many scenes simply beautiful, soft power, and silent night. The war continued even after completion. ”

Christophe Kantcheff, Politis

“There will be a beautiful bride prohibited and found an invisible child, gangsters and traffic, beaches under coconut trees, a Kalashnikov and buried crossings night on old bikes, like Rocinante Don Quixote. There will be fear. And above there will be this character improbable and beautiful, the woman who laughs anyway, a sort of god of survival after mud and violence, the poorest of all and most vibrant. Real coup, this unnamed woman also carries all the realism and dreamlike, it makes it possible and even necessary to unstable assembly of styles and tones that make up the film. Film surprising that we look in vain for the equivalent elsewhere (Imamura, maybe a little …), painful and toned film at a time, which supported the theatrics combined with sequence shots almost documentary literally invent opportunities to support pain, darkness and momentum. ”

Jean-Michel Frodo, Public Screening, Slate

“Veteran Sri Lankan cinema has experienced many difficulties (censorship) Handagama back with his seventh film, the better they say, mature work, where in a politico-policeman, he manages to create a climate of diffuse anxiety rather Kafkaesque. A restless, and aesthetically beautiful work, it does not hurt. ”

Vincent Ostria Humanity

The film is like his hero, direct. But realism that takes head-on-body characters, situations, objects, is exceeded by the tempo given by the director and his staging of looks, facing the characters. Few words, but from the looks of the veteran to his mother, his former mistress that leads against the advice of parents, to the wife that he involuntarily unemployed. Confrontations need of few words, because silences reveal the loneliness and confusion of characters that the director puts in. The vision is clear, from a perspective that always seems that the obvious, rid of all slag, reduced the expression of the essential. ”

Hubert Niogret, Positive

“Victim for more than eight years of censorship, Asoka Handagama, director of Sri Lanka, do not yet seem to have abandoned the pugnacity of his cinema, frontal testimony in the form of social thriller, the state of decay of his country . After two years in prison, an ex-soldier of the rebel army defeat returned to his village and suffered the rejection of its neighbors. Handagama denounces the political and economic situation with extraordinary dramatic power, served by a simple staging, a suffocating tension and an ever used violence. Containing a screed on superb portraits of men and women in search of survival. ”

Xavier Leherpeur, Le Nouvel Observateur

“Films often covers essential topics that are hardly the headlines. Much like the Sri Lankan Asoka Handagama referring here thirty years of civil war that ravaged his country by asking the post, with the return to his village of a former fighter of the rebel army. After eight years without turning due to censorship, it also shows that subtly powerful these ghosts of the past resurface … “

Thierry Cheze, Studio CineLive

“Missing radars since a decade, Sri Lanka Asoka Handagama reappears and asserts his seventh film as one of the strongest fiction filmmakers in Asia. (…) Careful work on the sound, light, and mostly nocturnal sequences that enhance the feeling of instability that emerges this drama chiaroscuro intonations Kafkaesque. A frozen world, where a child is crying for an old woman a sign of life to exorcise the ghosts of the war - that is the off-field upon which all this fiction as dense as febrile. ”

Vincent Ostria Inrockuptibles

“Back home after fighting with the rebel army, which was defeated, a man tries to get on with his life facing the hatred of those whose son did not return. Complex, the film exudes an unknown Sri Lankan reality and offers a tenacious woman a redeeming angel role. ”

Isabella Danel, First

“Asoka Handagama the helm of a formally inventive film and confronting the social and political reality of the country. ”

Florence Maillard, Les Cahiers du Cinema