"Your Touch Makes Others Invisible" is a hybrid documentary that focuses on the casualties and enforced disappearances through 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. The film fuses first hand accounts and vérité observations with narrative and performative elements. The fictional narrative thread of the film focuses on the mysterious disappearance of a young boy at the hands of a supernatural force which haunts a small Tamil community in Northern Sri Lanka. Through a close collaboration with locals, the film develops and threads this fiction into the reality of the situation there. The film follows the lives of the Tamil locals whilst observing rituals and everyday interactions. Interviews expand on their experiences during and after the war within the framework of the disappearances. Politically-inflected performances or “happenings” developed and enacted by locals describe the different aspects of their lives. The film weaves together the many personal narratives of loss with broader observations on current political and social conditions within the Tamil community in the post-war era. In tandem with a quest for answers and accountability, the film constructs a stark portrait of the lasting effects of the civil war now a decade after its conclusion.
