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Paper short abstract

Kaiya Collective’s platform for experimental filmmaking and visual research in Sri Lanka, opens space for relational, ethical, and political storytelling. Cinema becomes then a collaborative and sensorial process, with bodies, landscapes, and relationships shaping their aesthetics and narrative.

Paper long abstract

Kaiya operates as a living laboratory for cinematic processes that privilege encounter, improvisation, and relationality, offering new ways to think about the role of visual storytelling in complex postcolonial contexts. In this light, Kaiya’s work challenges linear narratives of recovery or reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka. This becomes a starting point in which the collective dwells in the ambiguous zones of collective memory, gendered precarity, and fragmented subjectivities. Its practice brings attention to the politics of the process itself—how we film, with whom, and under what conditions. At the core of Kaiya’s work lies the conviction that filmmaking is not simply a representational act, but a space of critical inquiry and embodied knowledge production. The filmmaking process becomes a form of writing that is fluid, open, and deeply influenced by the sensorial, spatial, and social dynamics that emerge through collaboration. Films emerge through open-ended writing processes rooted in encounter, listening, and improvisation, making filmmaking a practice of situated knowledge rather than extraction. Films are not shaped by a fixed script, but by gestures, suggestions, and interactions, creating an interplay between fiction and reality where the boundaries of documentary and performance blur. Through this, cinema becomes a tool to explore the present, not to capture it definitively, but to engage with its contradictions, silences, and tensions. Through film labs, screenings, and hybrid methodologies, Kaiya redefines cinema as a contemporary ritual—a collective, affective, and spatial practice. At the intersection of visual anthropology, cinema, and social transformation, Kaiya explore multimodal research, postcolonial subjectivities.