Continued from last week
The ways in which the film portrays the Mothers’ Front, not only misrepresent the activism of the broader women’s movement at the time but also devalues civil society activism of women. The Mothers’ Front, consisting mainly of Sinhala women, emerged from the South of Sri Lanka, particularly in May 1990, the electorate of Mangala Samaraweera.
However, the “Mothers’ Front” in Jaffna was organised in 1986. Meanwhile, there was a broad network of women’s groups called Mothers and Daughters of Lanka, launched in 1990, which built alliances among different ethnic communities. While the Mothers’ Front was facilitated by then opposition SLFP politicians, the broader women’s movement is made invisible in the narrative of the film.
Manorani is only seen in conversation with politicians and not with any feminist activists who were engaged in women’s rights as well as human rights issues at the time. The broader human rights activism, linking local with global networks, was central to women’s activism around disappearances. The film locates the Mothers’ Front isolated from local and global women’s activism at the time, providing a narrow, diminished view of the women’s movement.
The underlying message in the movie is that civil society activism, or the mobilisation of non-violent democratic movements, is futile because they are often co-opted by political parties. From this dominant elite perspective, the centres of power are political parties and not social movements.
More importantly, the way in which this story is told, makes no effort to link the past with the present. There is on going mobilisation by mothers and loved ones of disappeared, demanding justice, amidst multiple forms of state harassment and intimidation.
Addressing the issue of enforced disappearances and government accountability directly relates to the militarisation of the State. The integration of the military with the economy as well as culture, also applies to censorship of films as well as the promotion of specific favourable storylines reinforcing the ruling elite. The military is also engaged in a range of commercial activities.
In 2021, Sri Lanka was listed as the country with second largest number of enforced disappearances in the world, recorded at 6,259 — second only to Iraq. According to Amnesty International, the actual estimates of cases of enforced disappearance in Sri Lanka since the 1980s is between 60,000 – 100,000. Tamil and Muslim women are the main voices of the families of the disappeared, while there are also Sinhala women, with similar experiences during the 1988-90 insurgency.
Meanwhile, the Office of Missing Persons, established in 2018, remains mostly inactive. In 2023, the OMP had nearly 15,000 complaints filed. The difficulty of prosecuting these cases directly relate to a complex web of alleged perpetrators within the Security Forces, with a history of protecting each other while reinforcing institutional cultures of impunity. The ways in which the film treats this serious issue of enforced disappearances in the film, also relates to issues of markets and flows of capital.
Film, entertainment and politics
This film is produced by Subaskaran Allirajah, for Lyca Productions, which has also produced other popular culture films with social justice themes in Tamil Nadu. Founded by Subaskaran in 2006, Lycamobile sells pay-as-you-go cards to individuals, often low-paid migrants, wanting to make cheap international phone calls.
The way in which Manorani’s story is told in this film is mostly about entertainment (enjoyment and distraction) rather than art (evoking deeper emotions and provoking thought). By glossing over serious issues of human rights violations, the film contributes to cultures of impunity undermining public confidence in the criminal justice system.
By ignoring the on-going struggles by the families of enforced disappearance for justice, the film reinforces the vested interests of the militarised State, including the legal system. By implying that movement politics inevitably gets co-opted by representative party politics, the coded message in this film is about the futility of non-violent direct action.
The film reaffirms the heterosexual patriarchal gaze in Sinhala cinema, by normalising homophobic violence. By locating the film within financial flows and a hyper-masculine militarised state, it is important to recognise how films such as ‘Rani’, undermine more progressive aesthetic cultures (that emerged during Aragalaya) capable of strengthening struggles towards democracy as well as justice.
-Janaka Biyanwila is the author of Debt Crisis and Popular Social Protest in Sri Lanka: Citizenship, Development and Democracy Within Global North-South Dynamics, (2003) Emerald: London.
