‘Neelira’: The ‘memories of a war child’ that led to the film about a Sri Lankan Tamil family
· Scroll
Someetharan’s film Neelira describes itself as “a work of fiction based on the memories of a war child”.
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The 40-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil filmmaker’s childhood and adolescence were shaped by the decades-long civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatists.
Some of Someetharan’s earliest recollections while growing up in Jaffna have to do with the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, he told Scroll.
Dispatched by the Indian government to Sri Lanka under a peace accord between the two countries in 1987, the IPKF perilously found itself in direct conflict with the Tamil Tigers. This chapter of Indian military involvement in another country’s war – which led to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by an LTTE suicide bomber in 1991 – forms the basis of Neelira (Long Night).
The movie is set over a single day and night in a northern Sri Lankan town in 1988. A wedding is to take place in a Sri Lankan Tamil family. However, the night before the nuptials, the family home becomes a flashpoint between an IPKF unit and the Tamil Tigers.
Indian soldiers take shelter in the house that then comes under attack by LTTE operatives, sending the family into agony about their safety.
“The house represents the land...