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If you want to understand what happened, and what it means, this remarkable film is the best place to start.
Jonathan Spencer, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
Republic of Amnesia is a beautiful, sensitive and at times visceral account of Sri Lanka’s 2022 Gen-Z uprising, the Aragalaya. Its achievement lies not only in documenting a spectacular political event, but in capturing how that moment was lived through fear, humour, vulnerability, courage and the sudden discovery of collective power. The film shows that the struggle was not simply against a government, but also against forgetting. Rather than offering a triumphant narrative of victory or a cynical account of failure, it asks what remains after a moment of political rupture and preserves the clarity of that moment against forgetting.
Rajesh Venugopal, Associate Professor, London School of Economics
The photographies of the protests thus visually encompassed the tension between the counter-political and the anti-political permitted by the volatility of photography whereby a national kinship is claimed. Kannan Arunasalam’s poignant The Tent captured this tension in a film installation (2019).
Vindhya Buthpitiya, Absence in Technicolour: Protesting Enforced Disappearances in Northern Sri Lanka, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Republic of Amnesia is a deeply humane documentary that confronts the power of memory, silence, and resistance. The film works both for those familiar with the outlines of the Aragalaya protest movement that swept Sri Lanka in 2022, and for those for whom it is no more than the distant memory of an unfamiliar news story. The film hears voices too often erased from official history, revealing the personal cost of political repression and collective forgetting through storytelling that is elegant and profoundly moving.
Simon Long, former Asia editor, The Economist
Republic of Amnesia provides a compelling view of the grassroots movement that led to Sri Lanka’s 2022 uprising, combining observational footage with material shot by activists to place viewers within unfolding events. The film situates these moments within a longer history of political violence and recurring cycles of forgetting. It captures a moment of collective possibility before long-standing political structures reassert themselves.
Daniel Bass, Senior Manager, South Asia Program, Cornell University
We Love Self Up Here reflects the seismic shifts going on in architectural scholarship today. The contemplative film demonstrates the potential of architectural history to address complex issues of race, globalization, work, class, migration, and community. Buoyed by a musical score attuned to silences and light, the film invites viewers to listen, probe, and linger. It builds on an improvisational cinéma vérité tradition that effectively rejects conventional documentary clichés such as expert interviews and montages of archival records. The film sympathetically links domestic intimacy to neighborhoods and communities, moving ever outward to geography and to an expanded, shared postcolonial future.
The photographies of the protests thus visually encompassed the tension between the counter-political and the anti-political permitted by the ambivalence of photography. Kannan Arunasalam captured this anxiety in his poignant film installation. This consisted of two screens set up side-by-side. The first recorded a quiet day at the Mullaitivu protest camp, with the camera looking outwards from a tent onto the road as its residents contemplated the mundane, the war, and their future. On the second, by contrast, the camera turned to the 500th Day demonstration at Kilinochchi, where the protesters wailed in visceral grief, holding up photos of their loved ones.
What initially struck me about The Tent was its stillness and careful framing. Many of the shots appear like moving photographs, as opposed to narrative cinema. But the enduring image that I left with — the heart of the film — is a motionless shot, filmed inside the tent, of the women as they go about their daily lives — fixing the mud floor, cleaning, packing up the sleeping mats, preparing tea, chatting. In The Tent, a sense of connection or continuity with the violent past is not constructed through testimonies, but through the situated, temporal rhythm.
Struan C. Gray, 'The Times and Spaces of Disappearance’, Centre for Memory, Narrative & Histories, University of Brighton
The resulting 20-minute film is quietly and profoundly affecting. Arunasalam’s camera captures the still moments of the women’s vigil as they sit silently, make tea, read or sweep the floor. It also features, by contrast, on a split screen, footage of the crowds and noise of media attention on an anniversary marking 500 days of consecutive protest. Arunasalam came to filmmaking through journalism and this is the first time his work has been shown in a gallery setting. “We wanted to take this opportunity to show the breadth of his work,” says Bond”.
Yvette Huddleston, Two hard-hitting new exhibitions are on display at the Tetley, The Yorkshire Post
The Tent is his first gallery exhibition and provided an opportunity for him to explore the two-screen format. Steady, full colour footage adjoins hand-held black and white; creating a contrast between repose and agitation and between prosaic moments and media conscious events. Clever interplay occurs… evoking both tenacity and potential violence. The Tent is emotionally rich. Their stories are engaging and Arunasalam’s imagery is arresting. In these works and in The Tent as a whole Arunasalam invites us along on his journey to understand Sri Lanka.
For viewers halfway around the world, “I Am” offers both a rich portrait of a region through the eyes of its elders, as well as a reminder of how, when racial or ethnic differences are put in the foreground, they overshadow both public and private life. Kannan Arunasalam is a Sri Lankan-born artist who grew up in London and returned to his home country in 2005. His project “I Am” (2010-12), which includes video and a website, uses the diary form to interview elders in Sri Lanka, particularly as people from different ethnic groups are ejected from the country, causing strife and transformation.”
‘Dear Diary: Update on All’, Martha Schwendener, New York Times, about the I Am project exhibit at the Neuburger Museum of Art, N.Y.