Bio
Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka currently based in the United States. His work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. Samarasinghe received his BFA from UCSD and his MFA from CalArts. He is currently working on his debut feature, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war—the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019 and was invited to Berlinale Talents' Doc Station as well as True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020.Rajee's work has 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, REDCAT, SFFILM Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Chicago Underground, etc. He's received the “Tíos Award for Best International Film” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the “Film House Award for visionary filmmaking” at the Athens International Film + Video Festival among others. In 2015, he was invited by Harvard University to participate in their Critical Media Practice workshop, in 2019, he sat on the jury for the CalArts Film and Video Showcase, and in 2020, he programmed for both the REDCAT and the Slamdance Film Festival.