Rajee Samarasinghe

Envy the Monster

BIOGRAPHIE

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence. A lot of his work also explores contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which explores the current state of enforced disappearances in post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019 and was invited to Berlinale Talents' Doc Station as well as True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance Film Festival, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival where he received the Tíos Award for Best International Film, and Athens International Film + Video Festival where he received the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking. In 2021, he had his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

FILMOGRAPHIE