Utpal Datta speaks with Sri Lankan filmmaker Nadie Wasalamudaliarachchi about her acclaimed debut feature Pantrum, visual storytelling, post-war memory, generational trauma, political history, and the transformative power of cinema as a universal language.

Sri Lankan filmmaker, writer, painter and media personality Nadie Wasalamudaliarachchi has emerged as a powerful new voice in South Asian cinema with her debut feature Pantrum. In this exclusive conversation with Utpal Datta, she discusses visual storytelling, post-war Sri Lanka, generational trauma, silence in cinema, historical memory, and the artistic journey that led her from literature and television to filmmaking.

Cinema has always been her ultimate goal. Her professional journey began early in television, where she became a pioneer of Sri Lankan popular TV culture by hosting a massive seven-day-a-week live morning show. Aimed primarily at housewives, the program covered everything from law and cookery to literature. This platform allowed her to interview revered Sri Lankan filmmakers like Prasanna Vithanage and Asoka Handagama. She later hosted Tharumansala, a highly followed program showcasing new artistic talent, and produced Retrospective, a tribute series dedicated to the masters of cinema.

Parallel to her broadcast career, she cultivated a deep, exhaustive study of international cinema. Over the decades, she immersed herself in world cinema across generations—moving from VHS and DVD to the digital era—closely studying the visual languages of auteurs ranging from Tarkovsky, Fellini, and Hitchcock to contemporary masters like Iñárritu, Haneke, and Bong Joon-ho. While she received numerous acting offers during this vibrant period of cultural discourse, her ambition remained fixed on directing, viewing cinema as the master art form that encompasses all other disciplines.

A significant turning point came through her engagement with writing, painting, and political activism, which culminated in the publication of two books in 2008. Prompted by social injustices, this phase solidified her belief in the boundless power of visual language. She notes that while literature requires a reader to actively decode text and reaches a limited audience, a single cinematic frame can instantly communicate complex emotion, mood, and atmosphere. Ultimately, it is this unique ability to transcend the limitations of literature that decisively drew her to filmmaking.

Her debut film ‘Pantrum’ has already travelled a lot and established her as a new voice in South Asian Cinema.

How would you articulate the central theme of Pantrum in your own words? This film intends to explore the socio-political impact of power and conflict across generations. ‘Pantrum’ also seeks to examine post-war resolution from a different vantage point, as the son of one combatant and the father of another attempts to reconcile their differences and bury their trauma. The film dissects how Sri Lankan society has experienced loss through the hunger for power, from the foundation of modern Sri Lankan civilisation to the present.

The central intention is to open a wider conversation about how we see post-war soldiers, and about the fact that there are no real winners in war even for those who appear to have won. The film also seeks to begin a dialogue on the generational trauma carried by a nation's population, a trauma that can almost be read as an inherited curse.

As someone who has written extensively before directing, how does your thinking change when you move from words to images?

I became a writer in 2008, publishing a novel and a collection of poetry. In 2023, I completed the three-day principal shoot of my debut feature.
Ferdinand de Saussure described language as a system of signs, defining the linguistic sign as a two-part unit: the signifier (the sound or written form) and the signified (the concept). Language itself contains a visual element that supports comprehension. In that sense, we all think visually to some degree. I tend to think in images even when I write a novel. I see the scene first, then translate it into words. Writing a screenplay is the same process.

My background in television, where the visual is primary, and my work as a creative writer at Ogilvy Sri Lanka while writing the script where advertising itself is built on visual language, both reinforced this way of thinking. As a painter, I live inside the visual world. So, my thinking does not really change when I move from words to images; what changes is the speed.
A novel typically takes me six or seven years, at least five. A screenplay takes weeks. I may need a year or two of thinking time before I begin, but once I start writing, I can complete a script in a month or two.

Was there a moment of hesitation before your first film? Something that made you question whether you should direct at all?

There was no hesitation, because I had been preparing for a film for more than twenty years. As soon as we decided to proceed, I took annual leave from my position at Ogilvy and completed the script in fourteen days. As a published author and commercial scriptwriter, I had already developed that discipline.

I was fully aware that committing to a feature film without prior directing experience carries real risk. But I never doubted that I could do it. I prepared thoroughly; I drew the storyboards myself, personally reworked the shoot schedule, and remained involved in every decision. On set, I knew exactly what each shot meant. I held long conversations with the lead actor and walked my DOP through the philosophy, background and meaning of every scene. We planned each shot with precision. The whole film was shot in three days. The final look surprised everyone who saw it, because I was the only one who had carried the complete vision in my head from the beginning.

You are described as a multidisciplinary artist. Do you see filmmaking as a synthesis of all your previous practices, or as a departure from them?

Exactly as you suggest it is a synthesis. I drew on my experience in media, advertising, marketing, novel writing, academic work and visual art to make this film. It was not a departure but a multidisciplinary practice. In fact, having experience across other fields is enormously helpful when making a film; it gives you the artistic freedom and the conceptual space needed to create something distinctive.

Being a woman filmmaker in a politically charged narrative space, did you feel any added responsibility or resistance while shaping your voice?

I did not feel that, and I think my position is slightly different from the norm. Because I came into filmmaking from the entertainment industry and from the other fields I have mentioned, I already had a public voice. That, I believe, made the path easier for me.

The film opens up a world where even "antlions have stories." What drew you to this metaphor, and what does it hold for you personally?

Antlions are remarkable creatures. As a child, I watched village children play with them, they would place the antlion on their palm, draw a circle around it, and the insect would appear to dance inside the circle. It was a familiar game in rural Sri Lanka. The metaphor in the film comes from that memory.

It is also directly relevant to the story. Most Sri Lankan soldiers come from villages, and many would have played with antlions in their childhood. War narratives are written by power and politics, but they rarely mention the soldiers who give their lives soldiers who chose death over life not because they wanted war, but because the leadership and politics of power created that war. Ideology comes from the superstructure; ordinary people pay with their lives and their suffering. The film reminds us that not only kings have stories antlions too, have stories.

The narrative spans individual trauma and centuries of collective violence. How did you approach balancing the intimate with the historical?

It was not easy. History, for me, is memory. Every nation has its own history and therefore its own memory, and that memory is what makes us who we are today. Without memory we are no one; with memory, we move from being nobody to being somebody.
I wanted to link three temporal spaces: the prehistoric, the past and the present. I believe we sit on a continuous historical timeline, and that history shapes us and the way we think. So I went back to the ‘Mahawamsa’ the ancient Pali epic that documents the history of Sri Lanka, opening with the Vijaya–Kuveni story. Although the Department of Archaeology has no scientific or archaeological evidence to confirm this as the true beginning, the majority Sinhalese population still believes it is, because school textbooks teach it that way.

Sri Lankan archaeological history in fact extends thousands of years before Vijaya's arrival, yet that belief persists. I wanted to connect these layers, because I believe they are truly connected to who we are today. A human being is never simply someone living in the present; we carry a long past inside us.

Bringing that balance to the screen was challenging. I used different mediums to hold the layers together: shadow puppetry to represent the pre-historic era, archival library stock footage to represent the past, and reconstructed sequences performed by actors to represent the present.

Silence and minimal dialogue seem central to your storytelling. What does silence allow you to express that words cannot?

Every language has its limits, and every language has its own way of describing things. When I say "dog," you picture a dog but the dog I am thinking of is not the dog you are thinking of. We never think alike, because our signifiers differ. A signifier is the physical form of a sign, a sound, word, image or gesture while the signified is the mental concept it represents. Together they form the sign.
Language is also basically divided between the literal and the figurative. Literal language uses words by their exact dictionary meaning; figurative language departs from that, using metaphor, simile and other devices to create imagery, emotion and comparison. Figurative meaning becomes far more complex, and the same word carries different meanings across cultures and languages. But silence, by contrast, is universal. It expresses what words, bound by all these limits, cannot.

Your film seems to rely heavily on natural light, long takes, and visual stillness. How did you arrive at this visual style, and what were you trying to evoke in the audience through these choices?

The visual style of ‘Pantrum’ was not arrived at through stylistic preference alone, it emerged from the subject matter itself. The film deals with grief, generational trauma and the long aftermath of war, and these are not realities that can be captured through movement and spectacle. They require patience. They require the audience to sit with discomfort. Natural light, long takes and stillness were the honest formal choices for that intention.

Natural light was central from the outset. The soldier in the film comes from a village, and the world he returns to the trees, the soil, the quiet domestic interior belongs to a landscape that has its own light. Imposing artificial lighting on that world would have falsified it. I wanted the audience to feel that they were inside a real Sri Lankan place, not a constructed one. Natural light also carries time within it. The shift from morning to dusk is itself a narrative force, and allowing that to register on screen, without manipulation, places the viewer in the same temporal experience as the characters.

The long takes were a deliberate refusal of the rhythm we are now conditioned to expect from war narratives. Mainstream cinema tends to cut quickly through pain, as if to spare the viewer. I wanted the opposite. When the camera holds, the audience cannot look away from what is being felt. Trauma is not a moment, it is a duration. A long take honours that duration. It also respects the actor, allowing emotion to arrive on its own terms rather than being assembled in the edit.

Stillness was equally deliberate. In a country that lived through thirty years of war, silence and stillness carry meaning that movement cannot. The body that has stopped moving, the room in which nothing happens these hold the weight of what has been lost. I also wanted the stillness to create space for the audience's own memory and reflection. The film is not only about what is on the screen; it is about what the viewer brings to it.

These choices also allowed me to hold the three temporal layers of the film together: the prehistoric, suggested through shadow puppetry; the past, evoked through archival footage; and the present, reconstructed through performance. A faster, more conventional grammar would have fractured these layers. Stillness and duration let them sit alongside one another, as memory itself does.
What I hoped the audience would feel is not catharsis, and not resolution, but a quiet, accumulating weight, the kind of feeling that does not leave when the screening ends. If the film stays with the viewer for some time after, in silence rather than in conversation, then the visual style has done its work.