Letters From Sri Lanka tells the story of the Sri Lankan Tamil families involved in kidnapping, violence and killings during the civil conflict. Exploring their lives which continue to be suspended between hope and powerlessness. It investigates the emotional fragility of a population without peace in a Country still divided by the wounds of war.
Ten years after the end of the civil war, that created one million refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths, Sri Lanka has reopened its borders to tourism in the north- eastern areas of the country: the scene of the last and bloody clashes between LTTE (Liberation Tigers Tamil Eelam) and the Sinhalese Army. But among the folds of an apparent peace lies the spectre of the systematic “disappearance”, detention and killing of thousands of Tamils, at the hands of the Sri Lankan government, first, during and after the armed conflict.
According to unofficial estimates, the people kidnapped or arrested from military and paramilitary groups, from 1987 to 2009, could be 100,000. The matrix of this phenomenon was the collusion or affiliation to the Tamil Tigers during the conflict but thousands of people have denounced the disappearance or arrest of their relative ones for the only ethnic belonging.
2019 will be a crucial year for Sri Lanka, now on its tenth anniversary since the end of the war, a conflict that, for the Tamil population, has never ended but simply passed to a more subtle and less evident phase made of fear and loneliness. In fact the abuses of the ethnic minorities continue, part of the lands confiscated from the Tamils during the war remain occupied and the requests by the United Nations to clarify the dozens of secret military camps, in which the disappeard would be detained, remain unheard.