Joe Abeywickrama

When a young Sri Lankan woman returns home to her fishing village after growing up in an orphanage, she is appalled by its feudal prejudices and iniquities. She is determined to change things.

Baddegama or, more correctly, Beddegama is a 1980 award winning Sinhalese language film directed by Lester James Peries that follows the lives of village people in British Colonial Sri Lanka. The film is based on the 1913 book titled as "The Village in the Jungle" by Leonard Woolf. Silindu is a hunter in a small village where he and his family endure a life of hardships. After facing disease and poverty under colonial rule, the final blow comes when Silindu is tried for murder.

In rural Sri Lanka, two sisters pursue love and personal ambitions despite their family's strict social expectations. As class barriers and financial struggles intensify, both women are forced to abandon their dreams for family duty.

Lalith is a chief Clarke of a Government Department. He falls in love with Nilanthi, a newly recruited typist. But Nilanthi is attracted to another handsome young Clarke in the same department named Sagara. Lalith detests this. He starts to suspect each and every act of Sagara and Nilanthi. ‘Dahasak Sithivili’ is based on Lalith’s efforts to prevent himself from getting carried away by these endless suspicions.

An elderly man who regrets certain events in his past life displays his struggle to relieve the bottled-up feelings which had disturbed him throughout his life. Opening with the funeral of the elderly Guneris' wife the film follows the revelation of his past which is filled with a number of tragic events including a triple murder he had committed 52 years ago.

In a fishing village, Anton Aiya is an exploiter who outwardly resembles and acts like a regular fisherman, but he exploits and feeds off the other fishermen. In this setting, members of the urban entrepreneurial youth. They have adapted to Western culture, dressing like Westerners and preferring Western music. Conflict arises between Anton Aiya and Baby Mahattaya (Victor), a representative of the urban youth. A middle-class leftist, Weerasena, is also part of this group. The arrival of these youths has clearly caused a social crisis requiring a solution, and all Weerasena can do is stand on a platform and deliver a speech that no one listens to. He finally leaves for the city.

During Sri Lanka’s Independence Day on its eve, the holiday and the day after, and involves the participation of four oppressed souls: a World War II veteran, a prostitute, her thieving pimp and a clerk who have chosen the base of a tree as their asylum from the spectacle of pageantry.

​A naive village girl’s romantic dreams are shattered when she is forced into an abusive marriage with a cruel aristocrat. Stripped of her innocence, she must find the strength to defy the patriarchal society that bounds her, transforming into a hardened, fiercely independent woman.