Him, Here, After
Director Biography
Returning to his community after defeat in the Sri Lankan civil war, a former Tamil rebel known only as "Him" faces hostility, suspicion and bitter recriminations in Asoka Handagama's beautifully elegiac meditation on the aftermath of war.
PROGRAMMER'S NOTE
After twenty-six devastating years of civil war, Sri Lanka is only now beginning to come to terms with the deep scars left by decades of conflict. At the close of the war, the victorious ruling government instituted rehabilitation camps for the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fighters. Returning rebels received mixed receptions from their former communities, which were equally resentful of the costs of resistance and disheartened by defeat.
Sinhalese writer-director Asoka Handagama sets this Tamil tale in the time "after": after the war, after the trauma, after the return. For Handagama's unnamed protagonist, "Him," returning to his former life in the city of Jaffna proves impossible. Greeted by his neighbours with suspicion, hostility and accusations, he struggles to find a job and to reconnect with the lover he left behind, who in his absence married another man to save herself from conscription by the rebels. In a bitter irony, he now faces extortion when trying to get a new driver's license, mirroring the "war taxes" extorted from villagers by the rebels during the long conflict. When he finally secures a job as a security guard — befitting his imposing stature — his luck comes at the cost of another man's livelihood, and plunges him into a dark world of smuggling and corruption.
Without names, without pasts, Handagama's characters serve as reflections of the dehumanizing trauma of war. Haunted by the past, pursued by ghosts and shadows through the streets of Jaffna, "Him" is emblematic of the crises facing the returning soldier: the difficulty of reintegration, the lack of economic opportunities, the hostility of the community. Juxtaposing serene landscapes with strangely beautiful renderings of urban decay, Handagama's elegiac allegory neither wallows in grief nor mourns for a lost past, but rather explores the unsettling realities of postwar Jaffna. And yet, there is hope within this desperate, lyrical portrait — hope of an "after" for those who have lived through the traumas of war.
Cameron Bailey
There will be an extended Q&A with Michael Ignatieff, Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs, following the screening on Monday, September 10 at 3:15pm.
Michael Ignatieff, Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs, is an internationally renowned writer, journalist, former politician, and expert on foreign affairs.
