My first ever documentary film ‘Kaffir Culture’ gets sought after Vimeo Staff Pick and is shared widely, August 2009. “Very nice Kannan, well shot and very informative. Thanks for sharing.” Blake Whitman, Founder of Vimeo. Synopsis: “Historians say that the Kaffirs of Sri Lanka started arriving from the eastern shores of Africa in the 1500s with the Portuguese, and later in more waves with the different colonisers of Sri Lanka. ‘Kaffir Culture’ is a video portrait of one such community of Kaffirs and the struggle to keep their culture alive in the face of falling numbers. (Several years after the film was released, the community has begun to call itself ”Sri Lankan Africans” and “Afro-Sri Lankans”. The name ‘Kaffir’ in Sri Lanka has no derogatory racial connotations like it does elsewhere, for example, in South Africa). Written and produced by Kannan Arunasalam, from a script developed for an associated radio programme for Radio Netherlands Worldwide, with commissioning editors Greg Kelly and Michelle Ernsting.