Film Festival in Kandy

Colombo Institute has planned two Film Festivals in 2009 focused on youth.  The idea is to show one feature film and four or five documentary films over a period of two days to groups of young people that would hopefully open avenues to discuss a number of issues that are centrally important in the region [...]

Documentary Film Show

The Colombo Institute, in association with the German Cultural Institute, presented an initial screening of two documentary films produced by the institute on January 09th 2009. These films were produced by the Colombo Institute as part of a project of making three documentary films to explore themes of youth and multiculturalism in three selected locations in Sri [...]

Exhibition of Photography at Nadee Arts Centre

 On 13th November 2008, Nadee Art center in Dehiattakandiya opened to the public an exhibition of selected photos taken by its young student members during the photography workshops organized by the Colombo Institute since February 2008. The exhibition is the culmination of the series of workshops and activities where these youth were trained everything from [...]

Writing scripts

On the 21st of June, the sessions were held at the main hall of the Aludeniya Maha Vidyalaya focused on the dynamics of writing. The idea was to connect the students’ activities with the cameras to the process of writing: how to interpret an image.  At the end of the session the students were shown [...]

First steps in photography…

The first session was conducted on 20th and 21st of June 2008 where 30 participants took part. Though originally planned to be held at the main hall of the Aludeniya Maha Vidyalaya, the venue had to be shifted to the nearby Public Library as the school premises was taken over for a political event. The [...]

Writing the script

On 6th and 8th of June 2008, the Colombo Institute Team conducted another workshop at the Nadee Art center in Lihiniyagama, Dehiattakandiya focusing on script writing. The idea was to generate story lines from the young participants in areas that were thematically important to them. Among the themes they wanted to investigate in a potential [...]

Selecting photos that tell a story…..

first selection of photos

The second workshop was held on 10th and 11th of May 2008. By this time, the participants had already taken the photos. The photos themselves narrated multiple stories that depicted the different perspectives of the participants. A dominant theme was the natural beauty of their surroundings and their sense of cultural identity [...]

Initial visit

Colombo Institute was invited by the Gaveshi Resource Centre in Aludeniya in the Kurunegala District to initiate the film project the institute had already started in Dambana and Dehiattakandiya. The Founder of the group and an art teacher in the Aludeniya Maha Vidyalaya, Mr. Eranda Samarakoon, having heard about the program, wanted his students to [...]

Basics in photography and script writing

After the sessions on photography by Jagath Pathirage, all the participants were given a package of literature consisting of the introduction to photography illustrated presentation that was used for the course compiled by Waruni Anuruddhika.

In addition, ten copies of extra reading material on photography compiled specially for the course and two copies of a book [...]

Weaving their story

The second workshop in the series was conducted on April 5th and 6th 2008. The focus of this workshop was the creation of a story on the basis of the photos the students had taken over the previous month. Much of the images had to do with their life experiences in the adjacent Mahaweli resettlement [...]