Early life His father was a Science Teacher and Vimukthi’s early move to Galle was a result of his parents temporarily separating, thereby forcing him to live with his grandmother. But a wave of ethnic unrest, destruction, bloodshed and chaos shrouded the country in darkness. Starting with the Black July Massacre in ’83 and going up to the JVP Insurrection in ’89, the entire country descended into pandemonium and this disrupted daily life the island-over. The riots were especially prominent in Galle, being a Southern JVP stronghold and to get away from the violence, Vimukthi would escape into the tranquillity of the forests and wander around by himself. And when not doing that, he would hold up in the house and passionately delve into books. This passage of time was the anvil on which many elements we see in his films were forged. Reading led him to thinking and this led to an insatiable interest in media. To quench this thirst, Vimukthi journeyed to Colombo every weekend, to attend a class for a Diploma in Journalism, which was the only one of its kind at the time. At this point, he was still in school and had to lie about his age to be eligible to enrol in the diploma program. During this time, he volunteered for a Marxist print publication called Hiru where he mainly wrote on cinema and art. He spent of lot of time walking around Colombo, going from cultural centre to cultural centre watching whatever films that we being screened and it was at this point, he landed his first job at Lowe Lintas Worldwide, an advertising agency. Cinema He attended the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, India and after returning to Sri Lanka, began work on his first film, The Land of Silence (2001), a production that took 3 years to complete. The Land of Silence was a documentary in black and white about the victims of civil war in Sri Lanka. The film was made using cinematographic equipment from the 1960s and interspersed with occasional dialogues deliberately not translated but relayed by a background commentary. The film transforms images of the present into ghostly archives. The Land of Silence strips away the glory of war and puts a monochrome microscope on soldiers knocked into a mundane and dreary existence half the people they were before putting on the uniform. The documentary was selected by several festivals including Marseille, Rotterdam and Berlin. Following The Land of Silence, Vimukthi received a scholarship at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts from the French Government and the Sri Lanka National Film Corporation on the recommendation of Dr. Lester James Peiris and Dr. Tissa Abeysekera. At the Le Fresnoy he studied under Tsai Ming-liang, Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard and Eugene Greene. Following his time at Fresnoy, he directed a short film Empty for Love – which was shot in France and Sri Lanka. The film was produced by Le Fresnoy and it was officially selected to the Cannes film festival in 2003 and it won