A beautiful, powerful film was quietly released in cinemas last week, and if its ticket sales don’t improve, it will just as quietly disappear soon. Neelira, written and directed by Someetharan and backed by Indian production companies, is set in Jaffna in 1988. It narrates what happens over the course of a single night as a family’s home becomes the site of an altercation between the Indian Peacekeeping Force and guerrillas — presumably the LTTE.
I went to watch it in a near-empty theatre with subdued expectations, as I invariably have when consuming material about my Sri Lankan Tamil background, especially if dealing with the civil war or its genocidal denouement. I was stunned to find myself so moved. Neelira is the most brilliant and authentic film I have seen yet on the subject. In 1988, the island was full of conflict. There was the government of Sri Lanka itself, Sinhala urgency in the form of the JVP, Tamil insurgency that had by then been entirely absorbed by the LTTE, and the Indian army — danger was everywhere, kaleidoscopic. Someetharan was a child in Jaffna in a time of constant vigilance and imminent violence, as so vividly etched in his film. I was a child in Colombo: a city of curfews, bombings and assassinations. Tension was everywhere on the island, and its residue is still present in a bodily and intergenerational anxiety I recognise in myself and others. It is the same, disquieting tension — the tension of living in a time of war — that suffuses the film and gives it its haunting power.
Someetharan is Eelam Tamil, which is why Neelira’s linguistic and cultural elements are rendered unusually well. The difference is striking; so much art made about us, but not by us, parodies or erases us while capitalising on our history. Despite being produced in India, it never attempts to elide the distinctions between mainland and other Tamil ethnicities. My Indian Tamil partner, shaken by the film, called it “an education”. I had taken him to Sri Lanka for the first time last month. The trip surfaced some complicated feelings in me that only settled on our last evening, at a Tamil restaurant in Colombo where I saw clearly that he saw the deep sadness in my people. He acknowledged it. He didn’t appropriate it.
Neelira’s storytelling is impeccable, never exploiting the emotional weightage of its subject. Eschewing the operatic possibilities of a war movie, it is instead deliberate, intimate, quotidian. In devastating yet delicate ways, the film portrays details such as the IPKF’s documented sexual violence and the LTTE’s fluctuating status in the Tamil perception as protectors who also frighten and exert control. Most impressively, the narrative sides with no one but the civilians.
It does humanise the ones who hold the guns, and while such a choice can often be read as problematic, the profound compassion underpinning this film belies such a reading. Here, we have an unsung, elegant film that refuses to valorise war, nationalism or bloodlust released, while Dhurandhar dominates the box office and leaks propaganda into the populace. It is a gem, and I hope you will watch it.