Canadian Premiere
Sri Lanka has one of the highest numbers of unresolved enforced disappearances in the world — losses stemming from its decades-long civil war and endured largely by Tamil civilians. In Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe works closely with Tamil mothers and villagers in the militarized north to craft a hybrid narrative blending factual accounts with magical realism. At its center is a Tamil woman whose son has vanished, possibly taken by a supernatural force haunting her war-torn community. Her story is interwoven with firsthand testimonies from women who continue to search for their disappeared loved ones.
Filmed clandestinely in regions still under military occupation, Samarasinghe’s debut resists linear storytelling. Drone shots sweep across quiet towns; ritual fires crackle beside scenes of everyday life. Memory and grief share space with silence and resilience. A documentary shaped by collaboration and restraint, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible is a haunting, formally daring meditation on absence, history, and survival, where loss becomes part of the landscape and remembrance its own form of resistance.
Oct 9: Q&A
Presented by
Community Partner
Lajantha Kuna
Sri Lanka/USA
2025
In Tamil, Sinhala, English and Russian with English subtitles
Graphic violence; gender or sexual discrimination
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
John Craighead, Anton Palmer, Muwaffaq Salti, James Drew
Producer
Maggie Corona-Goldstein, Tabs Breese, Solomon Turner, DaManuel Richardson, Rajee Samarasinghe
Screenwriter
Rajee Samarasinghe
Cinematography
Kalinga Deshapriya
Editor
Rajee Samarasinghe
Original Music
Rafaël Leloup
Rajee Samarasinghe
Filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war. His debut feature, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 with support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents Doc Station, and Field of Vision. Named among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film (2020), Samarasinghe has had a solo show at the MoMA (2021) and received fellowships from MacDowell (2023), Yaddo (2024), and Guggenheim (2025).
Filmography: If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home (2016); The Eyes of Summer (2020); Lotus-Eyed Girl (2023)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Secret in Their Eyes
This month's Talking Pictures screening is a multi-layered, poignant thriller interweaving the personal lives of a prosecution investigator (Ricardo Darin) and a judge, with a manhunt spanning twenty-five years. Stay for cookies, coffee and a chat after!
American Doctor
One of the most powerful documentaries of the year, this puts us smack in the open wound that is Gaza, filtered through the eyes of three American surgeons (of Palestinian, Jewish and Zoroastrian backgrounds) compelled to do their utmost to alleviate harm.
