AHASINWITAI (THE FALLEN)

Rajith, a young man, flees the city in which he lives and where violent confrontations are common.
He goes to a village in a valley where the inhabitants seems to be still strongly influenced by an old legend.
The legend tells the tale of a young prince who is forced to hide in a forest because of a prophecy which claimed he would kill one of his uncles in order to accede to power.

What should we think of the world today? Ahasinwitai brings a kind of answer if I consider the current state of my own country, Sri Lanka. This answer goes well beyond what was shown in my first film, La terre abandonnée. Ahasinwitai is a kind of "climax" of the idea of power. The power of history and the past, military power, the power of nature, of individuals, of institutions and the power of film come together and spark off each other.
All these forces go through time, come from the past, appear in the present and reach toward the future.
I am acutely aware of what nature produces in terms of landscapes and emotions. Ahasinwitai has us leaving the city, peopled as it is with signs and violence (Rajith unwittingly undergoes a kind of spiritual journey), for another environment (the countryside, then the mountains) in which life is not a given, in which the signs are invisible, where feelings of the unknown, mystery and horror may arise, where one begins to feel that everything was, and still is, possible for human beings.
Cities make people mad, but nature is maybe even worse: it awakens the past, awakens legends. It is the witness of all things. It constantly talks to us and refers back to myth, calls upon our imagination and fantasies. It is also a place of great violence. Nature continually grows and is reborn in the places where mankind has established its presence; we are unable to control it. In this sense, it isolates us, precedes us and succeeds us.
In La terre abandonnée, I set myself the task of being like the architect of the landscape by creating it from the bottom up. With Ahasinwitai, it is more a question of creating something from within the landscape, to fundamentally invest it and interact with it so as to be able to reinvent it.