Popular Film Genres in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Amusement has been an integral part of the human society since long. The history of film, when broadly defined, goes back to thousand years. Sri Lankan film industry started with the production of Kadawunu Poranduwa (The Broken Promise) by B.A.W. Jayamanne in 1947. It was followed by number of commercial and artistic films and the Rekawa (The Palm line) produced in 1956 is considered as the tuning point of the local film industry. Sri Lankan film industry has produced remarkable films breathe new life into the Sri Lanka film industry over the past sixty years or so. The size of the industry and its growth is restricted by the small local market, so that the producing of commercially viable film is essential to survive in this market. The objective of the proposed paper is to examine the contributory factors for the popularity of films in Sri Lanka and to identify the most popular film genres in 2009/2010. Indian and western films are also imported and screened in the country in addition to local Sinhala films. Those imported films, however, mostly confined to Colombo and other main cities. The Tamil speaking community is interest to watch South Indian movies and English speaking society prefer to western English movies. The young generation, irrespective of language, has a great attraction to the horror type movies, war, action films and animal, cartoon movies. The conclusion of this study shows In Sinhala film category the family film genre is popular with Sinhalese. Information for the paper is collected from the secondary sources such as newspapers, magazines, journals, book chapters, books, reports, and archival records. The primary information is collected from field observations, interviewing of film audience, informed people, directors, producers, actors etc