Such a barrier thrives in the long term on that equally deplorable barrier between ‘High Art’ and ‘Low Art’. Rather, the problem is that when it comes to our film industry, the critics more often than not define good and bad and draw an artificial barrier between the two. The problem isn’t that what is good for me may not be good for you. What is good and bad and pedestrian, as I implied earlier, depends on the values a critic or an audience ascribes to them. Even those which (and who) top those greatest ever lists – and there hasn’t been a lack of them here or there, then or now – aren’t really flawless. The same could be said of directors and films from elsewhere from other industries. None of our directors, and none of our films, could be considered as perfect. Where we agree with each other, however, is the point that for our movies to evolve, the dichotomy between what is arty and what is commercial must be done away with. Who’d have thought that a film like Ho Gana Pokuna was possible five years ago? Who indeed? The young, of course! He has his views and opinions on the movies and all guesses are that they don’t coincide with mine. Now I don’t know much about him, except his name (which I won’t divulge) and his home town (which doesn’t matter). I met him quite by accident, I didn’t know of his existence until he began besieging me with one query after another, and about two months after we made our first acquaintance, it’s safe to say that I have not come across a person that age who is so enthusiastic about our cinema.

There is a young man whom I know, pretty much like the young man from last week’s piece, who is into Sinhala movies. “When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy and have opinions about, lose their connection with song and dance, drama, and the novel, when they become cinema, which people fear to criticise just as they fear to say what they think of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting, they will become another object of academic study and ‘appreciation’, and will soon be an object of excitement only to practitioners of the ‘art’.” (Pauline Kael)

Sinhala movies online free