Rajee Samarasinghe

A Tamil woman loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community in a war torn village in Northern Sri Lanka and intertwining with her journey are real-life testimonies with women whose family members vanished at the hands of military forces during the civil war.

A struggling black college grad wakes up to find that reparations have finally been paid to descendants of slaves in America. With this new found capital, they will decide how best to spend their reparations, totaling a mere $16,000. Receiving reparations opens up old wounds of slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic oppression.

A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption. This piece continues a series of cinematic works finding the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media as a means to dismantle hegemonic structures found in the culture of image consumption.

A haunting collage of pomegranate arils, rural and urban landscapes, family history and mandalas undulate at a crossroads between death and longing. Inspired by the love poem Caurapañcāśikā by Bilhana, Lotus-Eyed Girl unfurls the impacts of colonialism on human desire with a pulsating, ambient eeriness.

Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.

Music video for Shrine Maiden. To the west I rise To the east I sleep I pull the tides - And again, repeat And Again repeat - And again repeat I fall, i rise - like this reprise - And again - And again - And again i rise And again i rise - And again i rise No need to speak - a loop, a vow - and slow repeat - And again And again And again - I fall i rise - like this reprise And again we rise I wax, I wane - I fall, i rise like this refrain - Just the same And It’s just the same I fall, i rise - like this reprise - the night replies - and all we are - is this disguise - is this disguise So Rise and fall Again - with me Again with me

Crossing shadowed planes, our bodies return to the ocean. An elegiac tale of the high seas.

A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother's birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian "makers" becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

A symbiotic collaboration in movie motion. After Muybridge.

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself. Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker.

This footage was shot shortly after the civil war in Sri Lanka on the occasion of my mother’s long-delayed reunion with Kamala, the aunt she lived with as a child. Kamala was living a life of solitude at this point and has now since passed away—this film is dedicated to her.

Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film Reassemblage, this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance through a curious telescopic lens.

Two people mourn an unsaid tragedy in this silent play in cinematic narrativity and melodrama, telling an elegiac tale in portraiture.

Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.

This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.

The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of my mother’s past and persona.

A short procession of colorful material and a mysterious woman lit by the sun. A paean to Kenneth Anger.

A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz, Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this silent, high contrast, hand-processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. The filmmakers restages a Sanni Yakuma healing ritual that was performed over a 12-hour period.

In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother's village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning, and foreign influences loom over Sri Lanka’s commercial, economic, and media infrastructure.

In this brief film, the hand-processed celluloid manages to capture the mysterious figure of an exorcist in Sri Lanka.