Rajee Samarasinghe

Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.

A struggling black college grad wakes up to find that reparations have finally been paid to descendants of slaves in America. With this new found capital, they will decide how best to spend their reparations, totaling a mere $16,000. Receiving reparations opens up old wounds of slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic oppression.

Two people mourn an unsaid tragedy in this silent play in cinematic narrativity and melodrama, telling an elegiac tale in portraiture.

A Tamil woman loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community in a war torn village in Northern Sri Lanka and intertwining with her journey are real-life testimonies with women whose family members vanished at the hands of military forces during the civil war.

A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption. This piece continues a series of cinematic works finding the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media as a means to dismantle hegemonic structures found in the culture of image consumption.

The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of my mother’s past and persona.

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself. Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker.

Music video for Shrine Maiden. To the west I rise To the east I sleep I pull the tides - And again, repeat And Again repeat - And again repeat I fall, i rise - like this reprise - And again - And again - And again i rise And again i rise - And again i rise No need to speak - a loop, a vow - and slow repeat - And again And again And again - I fall i rise - like this reprise And again we rise I wax, I wane - I fall, i rise like this refrain - Just the same And It’s just the same I fall, i rise - like this reprise - the night replies - and all we are - is this disguise - is this disguise So Rise and fall Again - with me Again with me