Neelira

Neelira takes place over one night. There is a note at the end of the film, text on screen, that transcribes the long, arduous journey, from Sri Lanka to Europe, that now lies ahead for one of the characters—Vasuki. That text, pregnant with odyssey, suddenly made the film come alive for a brief second. Then, the film ends. Set in 1988, in Northern Srilanka, Neelira, the first Tamil feature directed by a Sri Lankan Tamilian, begins with the preparation for Vasuki’s wedding—including the logistics of getting permission from the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Sri Lankan army, though we don’t see a scene with the latter. Have they ceded control to the IPFK in this narrative?

There is a scene in director Someetharan’s Neelira where a group of children is playing outdoors in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1988. One of them blurts," What’s a game without guns?," as they indulge in a shooting game. It takes only one scene to put everything into context. These are children who should be playing hopscotch or hide-and-seek. Instead, they are thinking about shooting each other.