Sulanga Enu Pinisa (2005)

Title in English-Speaking Parts of the World: The Forsaken Land.
Title's possible translations: That which the Wind Dictates; Dictations that Come with the Wind. [according to Israel Vonseeger, in a comment on the "strictly film school" site].

A few persons living in a semi-barren region. Tanks and soldiers move through it, testifying to a civil war which seems to have happened recently (and apparently may resurge any minute). The film follows the events in these people's lives: the inner drama of a woman living with his married brother, the infidelities of the latter's wife, the wanderings of a kid who is befriended, in a dubiously insisting manner, by an elderly man, some seemingly haphazard acts of violence committed by the soldiers, etc.

The alienating style is comprised of a collection of filmic procedures which have been solidified in the 00's as a veritable school, baptized with the name of "contemporary contemplative cinema", and seems to be curiously prevalent among Asian filmmakers who received their cinema education in the West. Here, as in many (perhaps most) films of that school, what remains after one mentally discounts the style is a rather traditional set of filmic ideas and structures, and a proof of this fact is the surprisingly uniform content of the reviews. In any case, this is in the best of hypotheses a mildly interesting short or medium-length film, unreasonably stretched to count as a feature-length one.

Rating: 30