Damaris Lüthi

They were Tamil Tiger combatants, civil victims of attacks, or displaced persons. Five women from the feuding groups – the Tamils, Sinhalese, and the Muslims – look back. Two of the former Tiger-soldiers now live in Switzerland.

The documentary, filmed during ethnographic field research, shows three portraits of ‘ordinary’ personalities — Mala, a young weaver sharing a one-bedroom house with nine siblings; Santa Cruz, once a fishtrader and now a healer and magician; and Muthiah, a videographer of upper class weddings — living in a neighbourhood in Nagercoil, a south Indian town. The aim of the video is to show the persons not as representatives of homogeneous masses, but to acknowledge them as individuals who nurse their own specific worries and strategies in a changing world. The protagonists thus themselves comment about their own lives and actions.