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The International Centre for Ethnic Studies is pleased to announce the launch of Research Paper No: 10 on the theme of Post War Reconciliation titled,‛What Lessons Are We Talking About? Reconciliation and Memory in Post-Civil War Sri Lankan Cinema' by Dinidu Karunanayake and Thiyagaraja Waradas.Reconciliation looms large in the Sri Lankan post-civil war era that dawned with the official end of the military engagement between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. While the state-crafted political endeavours aimed at reconciliation such as the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) are yet to yield sustainable results, post-war Sri Lankan cinema’s capacity for cultivating inter-ethnic harmony between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities has become a worthy topic of discussion. Since the end of the civil war, many films ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by the true events of war’ have emerged. They tend to depict negotiations and interactions between the two communities positively and negatively. As Elizabeth Jelin (2003) notes, memory construction subsequent to events of political tension involves ‘uses and abuses’ of memory as well as ‘ownership and the meanings of ‘us’. This paper analyses the construction of memory and the presence (or rather the absence) of reconciliation in four cinematic memory works, Maatha (2012) by Boodee Keerthisena, Gamani (2011) by Sarath Weerasekera, Selvam (2011) by Sanjaya Leelarathna and Ini Avan (2012) by Asoka Handagama. While arguing that these films ‘abuse’ memory and ‘canonize’ ‘our’ memory, this paper will illustrate how they distressingly widen the segregation between the two ethnic communities through ‘lessons learnt’—such as celebrating military triumphalism, privileging ‘our’ Sinhala legacy over Tamil ‘otherness’, promoting a form of ‘visual atrocity tourism’, and passing culpability of war on to Tamils—which undermine the goal of reconciliation.This paper can be downloaded via this linkBox: PDFScribd PDF (Facebook required for download)source: ICES