The Girls

‘In the laments of the heart, the flowers of love do not die,’ say the opening verses of the song that accompanies the first images of The Girls (Gehenu Lamai). These verses serve as a kind of prologue to the story of two sisters, Kusum and Soma: the girls who give the film its title. In this foreshadowing, the tortuous path is announced — one interwoven with gestures of tenderness and loyalty—of the limited cultural reality in the lives of girls and women in 1970s Sri Lanka.

The Girls is Sumitra Peries’s first feature film as director, making her the first woman to direct a film in Sri Lanka. Peries also wrote and edited the film — editing being, in fact, the starting point of her cinematic career. She had edited five films prior to The Girls, earning awards for her work. Her first editing credit was in 1963, working alongside Lester James Peries, one of the pioneers of Sri Lankan cinema, with whom she would later marry and build a lifetime of creative collaboration.

Often called ‘the poet of Sri Lankan cinema,’ Peries has said in interviews that she initially intended to become a writer. It was this first artistic impulse that led her, at the age of 21, to migrate to Europe to join her older brother, who had long left Sri Lanka after the premature death of their mother. She also recounts that she always considered herself a rather average writer and, above all, felt the need to explore another medium of expression. Thus, upon arriving in Switzerland to study, she chose cinema, driven by the desire to make documentary films—to tell the realities of Sri Lanka through film.

Perhaps her early work as an editor transformed this documentary interest, though not her desire to represent her culture’s reality. What is certain is that in The Girls, Peries brought to the screen a fictional narrative based on the novel of the same name by Karunasena Jayalath, a poetic testimony to Sri Lanka’s political context in the early 1970s, with all its tensions and contradictions. The story of The Girls is told retrospectively, as a kind of critical reflection on the life of Kusum, the elder sister. It is through Kusum that we, quite literally, look back into the rear-view mirror of time.

The recollection of the past begins with the return of Nimal, her forbidden and unfulfilled teenage love, to the village where she lives. As the plot unfolds, we come to know Kusum’s everyday life, marked by the poverty of a peasant family whose ailing father is unable to work, and whose mother bears the burden of supporting everyone. We also meet Soma, her younger sister, who unlike Kusum does not devote herself to her studies but rather to pursuing a career as a beauty queen. The lives of ‘the girls’ are shaped by cultural and class barriers that, as announced by the film’s melancholic opening song, offer no alternative but resignation.

Kusum’s memories move chiefly between two settings. The first is the shop and home of her aunt, Nimal’s mother, the young man she initially calls her elder brother. It is here that Peries reveals the dynamics of the community and the importance of maintaining traditions. The class difference between her and Nimal emerges as an unbridgeable obstacle. And although Kusum fantasises about marrying Nimal, she yields to the values of society and chooses to preserve her integrity and her relationship with her aunt, renouncing love.

The other significant setting in her recollections is the school she is able to attend thanks to a scholarship. In the everyday rhythm of classes, conversations with her friend Padmini, and debates with classmates, Kusum appears happy, living as a typical young woman. The school is also where the director expresses the political context of the time: the dilemmas of independent Sri Lanka, the tensions of capitalist development, and a critique of the country’s economic dependence. ‘Not being independent and believing that we are is far more dangerous,’ says Gunpala, one of Kusum’s classmates.

However, despite the apparent autonomy enjoyed by Kusum and Padmini, Peries also uses the school environment to remind us of gender limitations and inequalities. Even in this world, girls’ aspirations are curtailed. The restrictions intensify as the film progresses, becoming clear when time passes and Nimal returns, no longer as a student but as Kusum’s teacher. These limitations are further underscored in the protagonist’s final reflection when, desolate, she tells us—now returned to the present—that she was unable to enter university despite all her years of study, having become one of the thousands of unemployed young people in the country.

The act of critically portraying the realities of women in Sri Lanka is one of the central threads in Peries’s films. And in a broader comparison with the global cinematic landscape, when considering the work of women directors in the Global South, it is fascinating to see how, around the same period, in different territories and cultures, other pioneering women filmmakers were also beginning to make films. Moreover, works such as Sambizanga (1972), by the French-Guadeloupean Sarah Maldoror, and Letter from My Village (Kaddu Beykat) (1976), by Senegalese director Safi Faye, similarly centred on social, cultural, and political critique within their respective contexts. Finally, reinforcing the pattern that connects these women’s entry into cinema is the fact that all of them began their careers in various behind-the-scenes roles, either as assistant director (Maldoror), editor (Peries), or actress (Faye).

The Girls, produced in 1978 by Lester James Peries, was restored by the Film Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Foundation, funded by FISCH—France-India-Sri Lanka Cine Heritage: Saving Film Across Borders—and re-released in 2025 as part of the Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival, 47 years after its original premiere in 1978. This was the first time the consortium restored a Sri Lankan film.

It is striking to think that a work which, at the time, was so successful with audiences wherever it was shown—even gaining international recognition by winning an award in Carthage, the longest-running film festival on the African continent, and being a highlight of that year’s London Film Festival — has since been so rarely seen, studied, or discussed. This applies not only to The Girls but, to some extent, to Sumitra Peries’s entire work. The hope is that the release of the restored copy will spark renewed interest in the film and, with it, a broader recognition of this filmmaker’s contribution to the history of Sri Lankan cinema—an artist who should now be regarded as essential, truly canonical, not only in discussions of cinema as a whole, but, and more specifically, of cinema with women. [1]

[1] We adopt here the change in preposition as proposed by the Brazilian researcher and curator Carla Maia in her doctoral thesis ‘Sob o risco do gênero: clausuras, rasuras e afetos no cinema com mulheres’ [At the Risk of Gender: Enclosures, Erasures and Affections in Cinema with Women], defended in 2015. Maia advocates for a ‘cinema with women instead of about women: by focusing on the relational dimension of the works — both in regard to the subjects who film and those who are filmed, and in relation to the connections between films and spectators — what we seek is less the pursuit of categorisations than the attention to the spaces of sharing created by each work.’