Funny Boy

Deepa Mehta has adapted Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 coming-of-age novel Funny Boy, a story which, seen through the eyes of a young Sri Lankan boy named Arjie, examines the backdrop of that country’s 26-year-long Civil War between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic factions. In the film – which was shot on location in the former capital of Colombo – Mehta, who collaborated on the script with Selvadurai, has translated the book’s six vignettes to a more fluid narrative that uses our protagonist as the witness not only to the tensions of the country’s cultural clash but to his own sexual awakening.