ABC "Late Night Live"

Listen to a short radio talk about Tropical Amsterdam and the history of the burghers of Sri Lanka.
You'll get lots of academic background knowledge about the burghers from anthropologist Michael Roberts, a few anecdotes from film protagonist Stephen LaBrooy, as well as some random thoughts from the filmmaker.
LATE NIGHT LIVE

Kandy Memories

On June 26, 2011 Tropical Amsterdam screened at the 1^st Kandy International Film Festival in Kandy, Sri Lanka. It was shown as a double feature together with the documentary Gandhi’s Children by Vishnu Vasu, a native Kandyan, that tells us about poverty and inequity in India. I would have loved to be in the audience to experience the two worlds of struggle portrayed in the two documentaries – worlds that could hardly be further apart. Disadvantaged people in post-colonial India struggling to survive versus a privileged group of underdogs in Sri Lanka struggling to hold on to their memories of colonial grandeur.

As you can deduct from the above lines, once again I wasn’t able to attend the screening myself, but I will share a few memories of my last visit to Kandy in December 2009 when we went there to interview Jean Arasanayagam in her hometown.

View from Queens Hotel

That night we stayed at the colonial Queens Hotel. It dominates Kandy downtown and overlooks the lake. To my opinion, it is one of the most beautiful British colonial buildings in Sri Lanka today. A huge part of it’s enchantment comes from the almost original structure and feeling it preserves till today. The rooms are simple and a bit run down, compared to the fashionable boutique hotels that mushroom these days. Queens’ rooms       are huge in size, with a big comfortable bed, dark hardwood floors and the essential ceiling fan circling slowly. No air-condition, which is right up my alley, and because of all the missing “modern comfort”, a night is quite affordable. A beautiful bar leads to the pool area in the backyard. The huge dining room as well as the even bigger hall for dancing emanates colonial pleasures. Jean Arasanayagam still recalls the planters, Brits and Burghers, coming down from the surrounding hills to the Queens for weekly social pleasures as well as for celebrating glamorous dinner dances during Christmas and New Years. She also vividly recalls the Independence Celebrations of 1948 with fireworks right at the lake next to the Queens Hotel. Jean came to watch with her parents. She did not understand what freedom from alien rule was at that time, she was still too young, but she remembers it as one of the most joyous occasions. 

Queens, Ball Room Renovation

Queens Hotel

Queens, Dining Room

Alexa Oona Schulz at the Queens Lobby

Premiere Screening at the Goethe Institut in Colombo

Last week TROPICAL AMSTERDAM had it's Sri Lanka premiere at the Goethe Institut in Colombo. The Goethe hall was packed to overflowing. And by the time everyone came in there was only standing room, and some needed to be turned away. Moderator Arun Dias Bandaranaike gave a short introduction to the film and of the filmmaker. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the screening myself. Dias Bandaranaike then recited a beautiful poem by Jean Arasanayagam called "Historical Disasporas" in order for the audience, as he put it, "to get a smell, a scent for what it might mean to be Burgher or not." 
The film was received with enthusiasm, and most people stayed for the following Q&A with Burgher historian JB Muller, protagonist Stephen LaBrooy, and Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, daughter of Mystica Flamer-Caldera who stars in the film. In the flow of the discussion the question came up again: What does it mean to be a Burgher? Stephen LaBrooy responds: "It's a state of mind."  But what does that actually mean, inquires the woman from the audience who had raised the question? LaBrooy: "It means that you have a pride or an honor to where you came from, but you are very proud of being a Sri Lankan. That's the state of mind. You have been brought up in a Western way of life, so you tend to see things more cut and dried. You don't see as much as an Asian view, as other Sri Lankans. But that makes the difference. That makes the world interesting. Um.... How can I answer this question? As I said, it's a state of mind." What exactly does he mean? I keep wondering while watching the video recording of the discussion that the Goethe Institut had made for me. A more practical approach to the question soon comes from Rosanna Flamer-Caldera: "Speaking from a younger perspective, not my mother's perspective obviously", she says. "Here things have changed so much even in the last 20 years. I look at my childhood and I look at things now, and things are so drastically different that I don't even recognize what it means to be a Burgher anymore. I find that I'm more comfortable saying I'm Sri Lankan and I just happen to have sort of white skin and light eyes which causes me no end of problems. .... It's really a tough tussle, I think, to keep referring to ourselves as Burghers in a country where our community is basically disappearing slowly. ... The Burghers themselves, coming down the ages, they are just as crazy and just as discriminating as everybody else. So, we are nothing special in that area. Thank God that my mother brought me up to look at the world in a different way, so that we treat everybody equally. But the sad fact is that in the Burgher community there is a lot of discrimination and bigotry. But we are not a superior race. We are just equal. We are Sri Lankans."  The video I am watching in my apartment in Los Angeles doesn't show the reactions of the predominantly Burgher audience, and I wonder what kind of emotions their faces might reveal.... 
For now I'm excited about the fact that the film inspires people to talk with each other and to raise questions that are hard and maybe sometimes uncomfortable to answer. 

Arun Dias Bandaranaike, Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, Stephen LaBrooy, JB Muller 

(courtesy of Goethe Institut Colombo)

Audience at the Goethe Institut in Colombo

(courtesy of Goethe Institut Colombo)