Colombo. Monday 28 June 2021. Sri Lanka’s internationally celebrated film maker and former Ambassador to France the francophone Sumitra Peries goes down Memory Lane this month on ‘Rendez-Vous with Yasmin and Kumar’.
Hosted on the YouTube channel of the Embassy of France in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, the show uploads at 7.00 pm on Wednesday 30 June.
Listen to her recall watching Roger Vadim shooting ‘And God Created Woman’ on the streets of St Tropez in the late 1950s with an “unknown actress” named Brigitte Bardot.
She also reminisces how, years later, on one of her many visits to France with husband Lester James, the couple were hosted at the family chateau in Lyon, owned by the Lumiere Brothers, Auguste and Louis, the inventors of the Cinematograph.
Coincidentally the first-ever Sinhala film Sumitra (then Gunawardena) saw was ‘Rekawa’, and that too at a special screening at the Musee Guimet in Paris when her future husband Lester James was en route to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.
“There was this big thing in Paris about a Sinhala film being screened. I was over the moon that I think I went in and even helped usher the people since I was so keen to see this film”, she says.