Rajee Samarasinghe: Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Rajee Samarasinghe: Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

Sunday November 23, 2025, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Rajee Samarasinghe

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

https://link.dice.fm/V6643b3ed25d

As many as 100,000 people, predominantly members of the minority Tamil community, are estimated to have disappeared during the 26-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Through a unique synthesis of interviews, news clips and re-enactments this docufiction reflects on this harrowing history as families search for loved ones that disappeared without a trace.

Prominent among the many unspeakable atrocities marking the 26-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka is the phenomenon of enforced disappearances at the hands of military forces. Estimates suggest that up to 100,000 people, mostly members of the minority Tamil community, may have disappeared since the eighties. Fifteen years after the end of the war in 2009, families are still looking for their vanished loved ones. 

In his debut feature Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe reflects on this harrowing history through a combination of direct interviews, newsclips, dramatic re-enactments and abstract, symbolically coded tableaux. Heartrending testimonies of grieving mothers are interwoven with sparse fictional vignettes produced in collaboration with members of the Tamil community.  

The film’s episodic construction advances a set of propositions around a spectral void, namely the absent bodies of those who are missing. This otherworldly quality is reinforced by present-day drone footage of war-torn areas, seemingly idyllic and scar-free, that has the texture of an alien incursion. Shot in challenging conditions by means of subversion and subterfuge, Samarasinghe’s film presents a singular, compelling reflection on crime and bereavement.  – Srikanth Srinivasan, International Film Festival Rotterdam, https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2025/films/your-touch-makes-others-invisible

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Much of his work interrogates the sociopolitical landscape of Sri Lanka through the deconstruction of nonfiction modalities and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence.

Samarasinghe recently completed his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka. The project has received support from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s PRISM program, and had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2025. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, Samarasinghe was also awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023, a Yaddo Residency in 2024, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA - Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum (2220 Arts), among others.

Samarasinghe's films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA's Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, BlackStar, CAAMFest, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, CROSSROADS (San Francisco Cinematheque), SFMOMA, Media City, Prismatic Ground etc. He's received the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Best Video Art & Experimental Award at the Tirana Film Festival among others.