Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

Official Selection, 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection, 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival

The opening scenes of Rajee Samarasinghe’s enchanting YOUR TOUCH MAKES OTHERS INVISIBLE lay out the stakes. Speaking to a British journalist, then-president of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa denies allegations of the military’s overreach and the white vans that abduct Tamil youth from the streets. Meanwhile, mothers speak of their missing sons and the hope they still feel, over a decade later, that they will be reunited within their lifetimes.

With the specter of those atrocities lingering in the air, Samarasinghe unleashes his camera. Gliding drone shots sweep over those streets, where sons remain invisible and a new generation goes about their days. We pass through fields, classrooms, and sites of ritual that bear the weight of violence and memory. We encounter everyday people in Northern Sri Lanka. Theirs are the blank faces of quiet witnesses to history. Around them is the deafening silence of hidden scars. Samarasinghe’s luminescent landscapes mirror the mothers’ unrelenting, if over-confident, hope: in Sri Lanka’s post-Civil War numbness and the continued quieting of its violent past, it takes these rays of visual excess and staunch maternal conviction to burst through the stillness.

– Brian Hu

Preceded By

You’re a Shadow

Directed by Rajee Samarasinghe

The haunting visage of a mother’s exorcist, etched into emulsion and slowed to a crawl as memory itself fades.