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He does in the film and together with his uncle, Ratnam extends his scrutiny to other former militants. “I never dared to ask my uncle about what led to his rebellion,” says Ratnam. “At that time, the Rajapaksa regime was strong and it was a dangerous and courageous commitment to make,” says Marina, who first spotted Ratnam at a documentary workshop she conducted in Colombo in early 2008.Īfter interviewing his parents, Ratnam moves on to his uncle Ignacius Lokanathan, a former member of the National Liberation Front of Tamileelam (NLFT), an extreme Maoist group that later split into two. Isabelle Marina, a teacher at the La Femis film school in Paris who wrote the script with Ratnam, says he was taking a huge risk of exposing his family by making the movie. Or, they’ll kill us!’” The words, spoken when his parents were fleeing Colombo with him to escape the anti-Tamil riots in 1983 when he was only five, become the point of departure for the film. “She said, ‘Be quiet! Don’t speak in Tamil. “My first impression of the conflict was the words of my mother to me,” says Ratnam. Ratnam assumes the role of the chief interrogator, staying in and out of the gaze of the camera, to ask questions. The 94-minute film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes film festival last May, is heavily built on testimonies of former rebels. When Rajapaksa was defeated in the 2015 elections by Maithripala Sirisena, only five days of shooting were left. Sometimes he presented scripts of love stories to the authorities so that locations were quickly approved. “I gave them sham scripts,” says the director, who was earlier a human rights activist. He lied to officials that he was making a film on trains in Sri Lanka.
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The repressive Mahinda Rajapaksa government was not a champion of freedom of speech and expression, but Ratnam didn’t flinch. Nothing changed when the war ended in 2009 with the killing of LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran. When he began making Demons in Paradise, the civil war was in the final phase and it was difficult to give a viewpoint of the Tamils even if it was a disapproving look at the secessionist movement. “The film is more introspective and critical of the Tamil struggle,” says Ratnam, 39, a Colombo-based Tamil filmmaker. The one-time militants agree that Tamil casualties inflicted by the community’s own members were close to 20,000 in a civil war that killed 1,00,000 people and left an equal number of Tamils as refugees. “We killed 800-900 TELO members in one week,” says a former member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), about a massacre of Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation militants in Kandy. Instead, the men, once part of different rebel outfits, are revealing disturbing details about how they were often engaged in cold-blooded killings of each other. Curiously, there is no mention of the enemy, the Sri Lankan military, that brutally crushed their struggle for a separate state for the ethnic minority Tamils. In Jude Ratnam’s debut film, the documentary ' Demons in Paradise', a group of former Sri Lankan Tamil militants is sitting around a fire talking about their fight for freedom.