Handagama's "Take This Road"

Sri Lankan film director Asoka Handagama's "Take This Road"  is an artistic testimony of the prolonged armed conflict in Sri Lanka. The film portrays the destiny of three families from three different ethnic backgrounds affected by the war. Although the cultural roots are different, their suffering is universal. 

A Sinhala family goes to Jaffna via the newly opened A9 road to see the Northern Peninsula. The Sinhala family consists of a father, mother, daughter, and son. Their father is a psychological casualty of the 1996 Central Bank bombing that took place in 1996, in which nearly 90 civilians lost their lives. The father suffers from startling reactions, hypervigilance, and flashbacks. Sometimes he goes into pathological dissociation and disconnects from reality. 

The Muslim family is visiting the North after many years, and they intend to see the lost property. In 1990, they were forcibly expelled from the North along with their community by the LTTE, which was an act of ethnic cleansing. The family lost their livelihood, identity, and dignity. They came to Puttlam and lived there for many years as refugees. When they come to their village, the houses are in ruins and uninhabited. What they labored for a lifetime had gone. Vanished without a trace. 

The Tamil family, which lives in the North, underwent many hardships as a result of the armed conflict. The head of the family, a retired government servant, witnessed how his enriched Tamil culture turned into a totalitarian cyanide culture. One of his sons joined the LTTE and became obsessed with hate and retaliation. The family undergoes war trauma that is beyond the usual human experience. Ruined infrastructure, land mines, fear, and uncertainty become the critical components of their lives. They have a foreshortened future now. 

The war in Sri Lanka has traumatized the people and made communities dysfunctional. People became suspicious of each other and lived in fear, maintaining a deep conspiracy of silence. The war affected every layer of society and every ethnic group, mostly up to the individual level. Although the film recounts human trauma and social maladies, Take This Road gives a powerful message to the viewers. Despite the suspicion, ethnic rivalry, and deep-rooted hatred, people from different ethnic groups.

As Ashoka Handagama, I sought to explore the consequences of the three-decade-long armed conflict in Sri Lanka through my book, Shell Shock to Palali Syndrome. In reference to my book,  Professor Richard N. Lalonde from the Department of Psychology at York University, Canada states, " A key point in this book is the initial and long-standing denial of PTSD by Sri Lankan authorities, who often dismissed it as an 'American illness." The book highlights the painful process of overcoming this official reluctance to acknowledge combat-related trauma, which left countless victims untreated for years.  The work documents the vast number of psychological casualties—far beyond the combatants—that include civilians, child soldiers, and war widows. The book illustrates these different presentations with narrative case examples, making the abstract concept of PTSD more relatable. " 

While I have made efforts to raise awareness about the impact of war trauma and its repercussions, I believe that Handagama's contributions stand out as particularly distinctive and effective. His work offers compelling and unparalleled insights into the armed conflict in Sri Lanka, provoking deeper reflection on the subject.