There are films that tell stories, and there are films that create worlds. Chatrak — which translates simply as Mushrooms— belongs unmistakably to the second category. Directed by Sri Lankan filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara, it is a work that demands patience, rewards attention, and lingers in the mind long after its final frame.

That it screens tomorrow at The Asian Literary Festival, Gampaha Edition 2026, is not merely a programming choice. It is a statement about what cinema, at its most serious, can do.

A Sri Lankan Director, a Bengali City, a Global Stage

Vimukthi Jayasundara first announced himself to the world when he won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2005 for his debut feature The Forsaken Land Festival des 3 Continents — a rare and remarkable achievement for any filmmaker, let alone one from Sri Lanka. With Chatrak, made in 2011, he did something equally audacious: he directed the first Indian feature film by a Sinhalese artist Grokipedia, crossing into Bengali-language cinema with the same uncompromising creative vision that had defined his earlier work.

The film was screened at the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and subsequently at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Pacific Meridian film festival in Vladivostok, Russia. Wikipedia For a film that never received a conventional theatrical release, its reach has been extraordinary.

Two Jungles, One City, No Easy Answers

In a forest near a border, a young Bengali man and a European soldier attempt to get the better of one another. In Kolkata, an architect named Rahul, who had gone abroad to build a career in Dubai, returns home to begin a vast construction project. Quinzaine des cinéastes Between these two worlds — the primal and the metropolitan, the natural and the constructed — Chatrak weaves its quietly devastating argument.

Rather than using the conventions of dramatic storytelling, Jayasundara introduces visions which the unfolding narrative helps the viewer link together. Attentive to the physical reality of the various worlds he filmed — in Chatrak there are two types of jungle: a natural forest and an urban jungle — the director reflects on the adjustment, or maladjustment, of bodies and beings to the changes in their environment. Festival des 3 Continents

The mushroom of the title is not incidental. These fungi represent ephemeral, intoxicating allure laced with toxicity, thriving in transitional zones between decay and renewal — much like the characters’ encounters in liminal spaces between city and wilderness. Grokipedia It is the kind of symbolism that does not announce itself but accumulates, quietly and irresistibly, over the course of the film.

Images That Think

What separates Jayasundara from many of his contemporaries is his conviction that the camera itself can be an instrument of thought. He creates images — not paintings, not graphics, not publicity: living visions. Cinematic dreams and nightmares, visible intuitions of the world around, visual understanding of what corruption of society and corruption of the soul can do. MUBI

Critics have been divided — some finding the narrative opacity frustrating, others recognising in it a filmmaker who refuses the consolations of conventional plot. What no one disputes is the visual seriousness of the work, or the ambition that drives it.

Why It Matters Here, Now, in Gampaha

The screening of Chatrak at ALF Gampaha 2026 carries a particular resonance. This is a Sri Lankan director’s work — made in a language not his own, set in a city not his home, addressing questions of development, displacement, and human alienation that are, in their essence, universal. That it screens in Gampaha, a city itself in the midst of its own negotiation between heritage and modernity, feels less like coincidence and more like intention.

Chatrak screens tomorrow at Wet Water Resort, Gampaha, as part of the ALF Film Festival. Entry is free and open to all.

Mohan Darmaratne