Deepa Mehta's film Funny Boy has been disqualified as an entry from the Academy Awards International Feature category for failing to meet the foreign language dialogue threshold.

The film was entered as a Tamil language film as Canada's official submission, but was found to fall far short of the foreign language dialogue requirement of at least 50%, with Tamil and Sinhala dialogue making up only 37%.

Following international backlash to the forced cremation of Muslim suspected to have died from COVID-19, which is contrary to guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Sri Lanka is considering shipping bodies to the Maldives where they will be buried.

Critiquing government mishandling of high-profile sexual violence cases across South Asia, Human Rights Watch has called on governments to “disregard populist death penalty rhetoric and listen to their own experts to prevent and end sexual violence against women”.

Sexual violence in Sri Lanka

As Sri Lanka’s UK-based Ex-Service Persons Associations (SLESPA-UK) recently congratulated war criminal and Sri Lankan defence attaché, Brigadier Swarna Bothota, on the ending of his tenure in office, Tamil diaspora activists continue to call for his arrest.

Sri Lankan police brought the town of Salambaikulam in Vavuniya under full lockdown last week after two people in the area tested positive for coronavirus. 

The mother and daughter, who returned to Vavuniya from Colombo last month, were isolated at their home in Salambaikulam. PCR tests which were conducted in Jaffna last Fiday that confirmed both had been infected with the coronavirus.

Sri Lankan police have been seen setting up barricades in the area as they placed it into lockdown.

Sri Lanka has recorded the highest number of elephant deaths caused by human-elephant conflict in the world. The Committee on Public Accounts (COPA) recorded that in the past 12 months 407 elephants have been killed in conflict with humans.

Tamil families of the disappeared were blocked by Vavuniya's District Court from holding a demonstration to mark 1,400 days of continued protests, as Sri Lanka ramps up it's crackdown on Tamils in the North-East. 

Jayavanitha Kasipillai, the Head of the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared, has been ordered to appear before the court on January 4, 2021, for organising the demonstration.

Sri Lankan prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and Chinese ambassador Qi Zhenhong, witnessed an agreement signing between China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) and Browns investment to commence the Colombo International Finance Centre (CIFC) Mixed Development Project in the Port City Colombo, as Chinese involvement in the project grows.

Funny Boy is a courageous, groundbreaking novel by Shyam Selvadurai centering a young, Gay Tamil boy in Colombo, [Sri] Lanka/Ilankai during the 1983 massacre of Tamils. As the novel — which had unearthed oft-silenced truths about the lived experiences of Intersex, Trans, and Queer Tamil-speaking communities — makes its way to the big screen, we find ourselves once again working to break through the false narratives around our communities’ experiences.

Following the release of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Funny Boy’ trailer, the film came under fire and faced calls for a boycott over Mehta’s links to the Rajapaksa regime and the lack of Tamil representation in the film. 

As ‘Funny Boy’ was being released on Netflix last week, Tamil Guardian spoke to Sinthujan Varatharajah, a researcher essayist and political geographer based in Berlin, who brought the controversies of the film to the forefront in a series of powerful infographics posted across social media.