Ini Avan reduces social travails in the North to one in which some less powerful but relatively more principled individuals battle others who are either seeking to profit from the former’s predicament or are blinded by hurt and prejudice. The film captures a social context that is fraught with trauma and divided along lines of gender, caste, and class but these cleavages are totally abstracted from the present, thus erasing, albeit very aesthetically, the specificities and embeddness of Tamil society in a highly militarised and undemocratic post-war Northern Sri Lanka. The film combines a construction and focus on the ‘enemy within’ Tamil society with an individuation and abstraction of post-war social dynamics, which the Sinhala-Buddhist state and large sections of the majority are more likely to be comfortable with.

In this sense, for all its aesthetic appeal, Ini Avan, is a film set to a Sinhalese grammar. It is a film in Tamil but the gaze is distinctly Sinhala.

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source: Groundviews