Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Coaxial, Los Angeles
Hi friends! We’re excited to welcome filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow Rajee Samarasinghe back to Shadow Kitchen for a screening of his feature Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (winner of the 2026 “Truer Than Fiction” Independent Spirit Award), alongside the LA premiere of his new short A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth. Rajee will be present for a conversation following the films! Your Touch Makes Others Invisible 2025, 70 min. Fusing allegorical magic realism and investigative documentary, and made collaboratively with impacted locals clandestinely in a region still occupied by the military, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible is a lyrical examination of these missing persons through 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka. The nonfiction elements in this film are structured by a fictional narrative thread which tells the surreal tale of a mother who loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community—a nod to the actual disappearances in the region. (Watch the trailer here.) A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth 2026, 8 min. Fresh from screenings at Oberhausen and Prismatic Ground, this film emerged from footage originally captured for Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, in particular a testimony that could not be fully conveyed within the framework of the feature. This iteration reshapes the original context, exploring the divide between filmmaker and participant, the intersection of ethnographic and colonial perspectives, and questioning cinema’s ability to bear witness. Through silence, rupture, and absence, the film attends not only to what can be shown, but to what remains unreachable, withheld, or lost. Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He received his BFA from UC San Diego and his MFA from CalArts. He recently completed his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which has received support from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, & True/False Film Festival’s PRISM program, and had its world premiere at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, Samarasinghe was also awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023, a Yaddo Residency in 2024, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA - Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum (2220 Arts), among others. Samarasinghe’s films have been exhibited at many prestigious venues, including the Tiger Short Competition at IFFR, New Directors/New Films by MoMA & Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, BFI London, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne IFF, Vancouver IFF, Guanajuato IFF, BlackStar, CAAMFest, San Diego Asian FF, L.A. Asian Pacific FF, SFMOMA, Message to Man, Media City, Prismatic Ground etc. He's received the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Best Video Art & Experimental Award at the Tirana Film Festival among others.