ACF Asian Cinema Fund

Script Development Fund

2014

2014 Script Development Fund

LIST Hair of the Dog that Bit You
Category Asian Project
Project Hair of the Dog that Bit You
Director Vimukthi JAYASUNDARA
Country Sri Lanka
Director's Profile Vimukthi Jayasundara is an award-winning Sri Lankan director known for his surreal films that erase the borders between fiction and documentary, between cinema and visual art. After finishing his documentary <The Land of Silence>(2002), about the victims of civil war, he made his directorial debut with <The Forsaken Land>(2005), which won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes. Jayasundara followed this with <Between Two Worlds>(2009), which competed at Venice Film Festival, and has been shown at over 100 festivals internationally. His third feature <Mushrooms>(2011) was filmed in India and went on to be selected for Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. In 2012 he was invited to be one of three international directors to produce a film for the Jeonju Digital Project in 2012, for which he made <Light in Yellow Breathing Space>(2012); it was selected for the Film Festival Locarno.
Synopsis
A woman, working as a tourist guide is raped by someone while she was travelling through a forest reserve with a group of bird watchers. As a result of this traumatic event she loses her memory and fails to recognize the man she loved. The man is struggling to cope with her memory loss and desperately attempts to help her regain her past. As she recovers her memory she also raises an enemy from whom she has to defend herself. In her attempt to battle the traces of the past she requires the help of her lover. It in turn forces him to face his own feelings of insecurity, responsibility and moral judgment, leading him to an ancient battle of heroism and virtue. In the process he encounters a strange man whose surreal presence begins to blur the lines of demarcation between reality and myth, possibility and impossibility.
Director's Note
This is my seventh film, after the three shorts and three features, spanning a decade of cinematic work. One salient feature of all my work, perhaps with the exception of my last short film <Light in Yellow Breathing Space>, has been my concern with the social and the common, over the personal and the subjective. For the first time I am moving away from the realm of surroundings to explore the development of a character, and the subjective decisions that entails. In this film I am trying to explore the human condition where when we expect something how we get it with its polar opposite. A woman, who wants to regain her memory, in her attempt to be with a lover, also enacts an object of hatred and revenge. This entails a fairy tale like ending to the most serious of beginning of discovering one’s identity.
Festivals
2015 Locarno Film Festival - Officel Competition
2015 TOKYO FILMeX International Film Festival - Jury Mention
Still Cut
LIST