Sudath Mahaadivulwewa at Nandan on Saturday. Picture by Aranya Sen

The soft-speaking Sudath Mahaadivulwewa has kicked up quite a storm on the Nandan premises with his Shades of Ash. This debutant director from Sri Lanka has a political view of his own and is not scared to speak his mind.

Shades of Ash centres around some villagers who, having survived a massacre, return to their roots many months later. In the land of their ruined homes and dead family members, a fresh struggle begins to re-orient them with the new emerging socio-economic condition.

With a gamut of ?symbolic characters?, Sudath explores the ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils shadowing his country for years. He has deliberately made the film stark and hard-hitting and the audience response in his homeland has been ?mixed?. ?I had a definite agenda behind making this film. I wanted people to take up my film as a platform to discuss the issue of permanent settlement, without solving which there can be no peace,? says Sudath, who has been accused of ?disturbing the mentality? of soldiers in Sri Lanka.

?Some people have also felt that I am biased towards the LTTE. But I have tried to show real life,? affirms the director, who has been an advertising copywriter, a journalist and then a telefilm-maker before switching to celluloid.

Shades of Ash germinated from a trip that Sudath had made to some villages of Sri Lanka for a documentary film. ?At that time I didn?t know I would be making a film out of it. But I had enough time to listen to the stories of the villagers, who also poured out their personal problems,? says he.

Sudath has taken one-and-a-half years to finish the script, spent three months hunting locations and shot the film in 22 days. The film, made in 2004, was screened at the Goteborg Film Festival last year.