The surreal tale of a spellbound Tamil factory worker who loses her son to a supernatural entity. Collaboratively enacted by impacted locals, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible is a lyrical exploration of disappearances in a small post-war community in northern Sri Lanka where memories of interactions between the Tamils and the Sinhalese linger.
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 — the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. 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, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.