Burnt memories on the silver screen

 Sritharan Someetharan, the director of Burning Memories, a film about the 1981 destruction of the Jaffna library, grew up between Jaffna and Batticaloa. Born just 19 days prior to the burning of the library, Someetharan was deeply impacted by the event from an early age. Gripped by the desire to tell the library’s story from the Tamil perspective, he filmed Burning Memories between 2005 and 2006 using a handheld video camera. He had a driver, but no film crew. Though the documentary was released in 2007, it was not screened in Sri Lanka until Monday evening. It has been shown in film festivals in India, England, France, Canada, and America among other places.

The documentary tells the history of the Jaffna library, which housed over 97,000 books and rare manuscripts at the time of its destruction.

It was considered the best collection of Tamil literature in Sri Lanka, if not the world. The film covers the library’s history since its founding in 1933, and makes use of voice-overs and interviews with people closely connected to the library.

While the film touches on the library’s founding, it concentrates mostly on the social, cultural, and political ramifications of the collection’s annihilation—an incident that helped escalate the conflict that would drag on for around 30 years. Made from a collage of photos, video clips, paper clippings, interviews, and speeches, Burning Memories places the library’s burning in its historical context, tracing the event’s consequences.

Though Someetharan moved to India in 2004 to study, he spends a lot of time in Sri Lanka, and has made several other films, including Taraki, which covers the life and death of “Taraki” Sivaram, a pro-Tamil Sri Lankan journalist who was abducted and killed.

The following are excerpts of the interview with Sritharan Someetharan:

q: You made this movie over 10 years ago, so you must be excited that it’s screening now.

a: Yes, I am. I had to wait a decade for a screening of my film in my own country! But I’m happy because this subject is very close to my heart. In 2007, after I finished the film, I tried to screen it here. At that time, we couldn’t screen it because of the political situation in the country. Several organizations that I was working with said it was not a good idea to screen the film.

q: What compelled you to make this film?

a: Interestingly, this library was burnt just 19 days after my birth. I am a child of war. My generation, really the generation before me, took up arms in retaliation, largely for the burning of the library. But I was very much affected by the war. I was born during the war and lived during the war. I was displaced many times. When I was four, I first ran away from my house. This is a normal life for war children, and I traveled from one place to another. I made this film because I would like to say something to my people, the Tamils and Sinhalese. I would like to clarify this issue for the Sri Lankan community to start reconciliation. The best way to reconcile ourselves is to try to understand the other side, and I tried to make this happen in my film. I also wanted to show that the burning of the library is not a way to improve the coexistence of the entire community. So I would like to document these things and show them to the people so that they can learn from history. That way, we do not repeat history.

q: So what does the burning of the library mean to you? Was it more than the destruction of the intellectual history of the Tamil people in the North?

a: It was not only a cultural loss for the Tamil people, it was a cultural loss for Sri Lankan people. That was the biggest library in Sri Lanka at the time. And it was not a government library or a municipal library, but the people’s library. I focus on that in the film. People collected money and books in order to develop their own library.

q: How do you think the reconciliation process is going? Has Sri Lanka made a lot of progress since you left in 2004?

a: Well, during these last 10 years, so many things happened. The end of the war was very brutal in the North and East. many journalists left the country several years back, but I’m encouraged that Sri Lanka is going to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and trying to work things out. So I hope the situation is changing now. I now have the opportunity to screen my film, so this is clearly a sign that things are changing. I would like to support the reconciliation process as a filmmaker, and I have been trying to do this. I made a film about the killing of journalists in Sri Lanka, and later on, I made a film about the Mullaitivu people who suffered at the end of the war. I made several films after this one to try to tell the story of the people of the North and East so that people understand what it was like to live in these places during the war.

q: How do these projects help reconciliation?

a: I hope they help. The main problem is that there is a lack of information exchange. Tamil people and Sinhalese people have to exchange their views, their stories. I am a child who was born in Jaffna when it was fully in the war. I was in a LTTE-controlled area for a long time.

But a Sinhalese person from Matara will have a totally different view of who I was as a child. During my school days, the picture I had of the Sinhalese was army men with guns. So I thought the Sinhalese were the army men who were ready to kill us. The same thing happened in the Sinhalese community. I now have a lot of Sinhalese friends, and they had the same point of view. They thought all Tamils were part of the LTTE, and that at any time, they could send a suicide bomber to kill them. We have to promote reconciliation from the bottom up. We have a common culture that must be celebrated.

q: So the film works to foster cultural exchange, to show the Tamil side of it. Can you talk a little bit about the people in the film?

a: Many of these people witnessed the event in 1981. Many people were affected by the war, but I focus on a few people. In 2006, many people would not talk to me on camera, given the ongoing situation. Only some spoke to me, and they were very close to the library. The Jaffna Municipal Council Commissioner is featured prominently in the film, and he witnessed the fire.

q: Do you think there was a long-term effect on the Tamil people due to the library’s destruction?

a: Yes. The most immediate effect was to make young boys and men take up arms. Not me, because I was born at the same time as the fire. But youth at that time, college and university people, they said they would fight back. They took that resolution in front of the library. Personally, I felt that the library’s burning is a key point of the armed struggle. We lost so much cultural heritage. 97,000 books, an entire knowledge base, was burned! Now, there are new books.

A library is not a building. A library is made up of books and manuscripts. The building is important, yes, but to burn the books is much more damaging than to burn the building. The burning of the library is the burning of knowledge.

q: If you were to make your film now, how would you change it?

a: If I made this film now, it might be different. I would like to add more events that occurred and more information that surfaced during and after the end of the war. I know a lot of extra details about the issue now. In the film, I had so many restrictions.

It was difficult to even use the camera to shoot people. I could not interview everybody I wanted, and I could not travel freely. I was alone, shooting the film. I had no crew. It was me and the driver, that’s it.

Two of us. Nobody would come and support us because they were scared. Now the situation is very good. Anyone can go anywhere. You can take a camera and use it anywhere. If I carried a camera with me and walked on the road at that time, I would be stopped after 10 metres.

q: Do you have any desire to come back and work here?

a: Most of the time I’m here, I move around. I’m planning to do a feature film in Sri Lanka. I’m going to tell a story, and it might be a romantic story. Nowadays, I don’t want to talk about hardcore politics as much. I would like to explain politics through stories and fiction. I’m more interested now in telling stories of the people. But I would like to be here. I’m a Sri Lankan, so I do intend to spend a lot of time here. But Chennai to Colombo is an hour's flight. It’s easy. Even if I stay in Chennai, I can be here.