What makes someone, from what youвЂ™ve seen, record a moment rather than protect themselves?Д¬allum: Well, thereвЂ™s two sets of footage in a way. IвЂ™m thinking about that scene we saw tonight, where someone asks the camera вЂњwhy are you shooting this video ? Why donвЂ™t you just hide in the bunker ?вЂќ From the beginning that stayed with me. And youвЂ™ve done this for so many years, youвЂ™ve taken so much footage, youвЂ™ve met and corresponded with a lot of people whoвЂ™ve given you this footage. Rohini: One of the things I wanted to ask you Callum was, because of the nature of your investigation itself, when people are telling you what happened, theyвЂ™re also giving you access to their footage, theyвЂ™re giving you something that they have shot when it was going on. And itвЂ™s a very vivid way of describing it and introducing people to it which is quite good. And CallumвЂ™s film, the Killing Fields, which was the initial version of the film we saw tonight, that documentary aired on Channel 4, it was one of the ways that I could see what they had seen, because of these visuals, so thank you Callum.Д¬allum Macrae: I think that one of the things that is really important about RohiniвЂ™s book is that it does actually explain, in a way that we couldnвЂ™t begin to explain in the film, the complex relationship between the Tigers and the Tamils of the North and East: A relationship you need to understand if you are going to make sense of what happened there. Violence is not something that is always as bloody as what we saw, it also happens on the level of their very existence, on what they describe as their identity. So the book is about these three and their journeys living in Sri Lanka and trying to stay, because they do love being there, but itвЂ™s hard to be in a place where your identity is always contested. HeвЂ™s disappeared, and I didnвЂ™t meet him because he was not traceable when I first heard about him, and so I interviewed his mother, Indra, who is the third person. Another is a person who was disappeared, kidnapped from the streets of Colombo, that beautiful city with the coastline that we saw in these pictures. By the time I met Mugil she was the mother of two young boys and sheвЂ™d been through situations quite similar to what we saw today in CallumвЂ™s film. Three people: one is a former combatant who was recruited as a child soldier in the Tamil Tigers. Not just at the end of the war, but all their lives, as they emerged into what the country calls вЂњa peaceful situationвЂќ.

Rohini Mohan: I went first in 2009, after the end of the war, so the visuals that we saw in the film today were not things that I witnessed, but I met lots of people and talked with them about what they experienced, and I focused on three of those people, still in Sri Lanka, and what they experienced living during the end of the war, and also what they are still going through living in Sri Lanka as survivors, as minorities, as people who have undergone a lot of trauma but need to move on. The conversation has been edited for length. Mohan and Macrae spoke just before the elections about the waning days of the conflict, the difficulty of telling the story of the Tamil Tigers, and what journalists can do to contribute to post-war justice. It is unclear to what extent president-elect Maithripala Sirisena will end this repression, though he had pledged not to prosecute Rajapaska for war crimes on the campaign trail. MohanвЂ™s new book, The Seasons of Trouble, follows three Tamils in the the last years of the war and its aftermath, while MacraeвЂ™s feature documentary вЂњ No Fire ZoneвЂќ focuses in on the bloody final weeks of the conflict, in which over 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed.Д«oth trace a history that the regime of president Mahinda Rajapaska-who ruled Sri Lanka from 2005 until a surprising electoral loss this January-has tried to repress through censorship, slander and violence. The war, fought between the insurgent Tamil Tigers, who aimed to establish an independent state for the countryвЂ™s Tamil minority, and the Sri Lankan army, mostly made up of the countryвЂ™s Sinhalese majority, ended in 2009. Last month at Union Docs in Brooklyn, journalist Rohini Mohan and documentary filmmaker Calum Macrae sat down to discuss their respective works on the end and aftermath of the twenty-five year civil war in Sri Lanka.

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