Every once in a while I see a film that stays with me.
Flying with one wing is a film that I can't get out of my head.
The same year it was released internationally, the film was banned in its native Sri Lanka.
That same year the prime minister made some absurd remarks about feminists and lesbians and women in general needing a good man to give them 'what for' of all the absurd things, the same day an international conference was taking place in Sri Lanka, the same prime minister released convicted rapists from a local prison while making that statement. Gender politics in Sri Lanka seem twisted from my western perspective. I'm sure there is more to it, more nuanced than translation permits, and far more complicated than this blog could hope to cover.
That being said, Flying with One Wing is an incredibly made film, people have compared it to Boys Don't Cry, but it goes further and shows trans identity as a slice of life rather than an anomaly.
If you ever get a chance to see this film, please do. Brave, beautiful and graceful. We should all be so lucky to make a film like this.
"It looks as though that the medial fraternity, artistic community and the so-called guardians of culture are getting organised to question me even more once the film has been shown (...)
I am ready to face your attack so that you can sharpen your weapons. Actually what I really want is for the film to be discussed."
Ashoka Handagama
(Excerpts of an interview in Sunday Island, 29/12/2002).
Here's a great write up from a Journo in France about the film:
The second cineaste is Ashoka Handagama whose This is My Moon was recently released in French theatres, author of, this time, a surprising Flying with One Wing, shot with a light budget specially on the sound side - Handagama is a bank employee who shoots his film during the week-ends or vacations.
http://www.chez.com/suriyakantha/flying4.jpg
Refused by many festivals except Saint Sebastian, then screened at Trois Continent at Nantes, the film slices with the aesthetical and narrative standards of the world cinema the good taste that jams the festivals.
Flying with One Wing amplifies the sexual tensions present in This is My Moon. Its subject matter is the male chauvinism and the sexism, that leaves the woman with an alternative in the job market: the enticing secretary vowed to the prostitution hardly disguised. Hence, the woman disguises as a man, like the heroine of the film who works as garage mechanic among other men, lives with a woman without disclosing his/her real nature. Commences then a complicated politico-sexual fable coupled with a joyful barbarity, sometimes cruel, deserving the best of Fassbinder in which everything is possible, from the sexuality's organic nature (and its possible misunderstanding) to the painful social organisation of a world based on the sexual differences. Caustic and really tonic.
