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BRITISH JOURNALISTS RECALL
HOW THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL FILM
THIRD WAVE WAS MADE WHEN TSUNAMI STRUCK SRI LANKA
By Walter Jayawardhana
London’s Metro newspaper was one, which was vigorously involved
in helping the tsunami victims in Sri Lanka’s Boxing Day disaster
in 2005.
The relatively new mass circulated newspaper is different from many
other traditional one’s like the Murdoch owned Times. With a circulation
of 1.3 million it is being freely distributed at London’s underground
railway stations where millions of office and blue-collar workers flock
to commute to work. Thanks to newspapers like the Metro, a give away
tradition copied from Germany, millions of Londoners who are fast giving
up newspapers largely due to the invading Internet and television, still
read news in the morning. The newspaper is sustained by advertisements.
The Metro announced in its May 22, 2008 issue’s Focus column which
records background information on news and (that’s incidentally
on Sri Lanka’s Republic Day) how at Peraliya near Hikkaduwa volunteers
built the devastated village from scratch.
The Focus column of the newspaper also announced that May 16 , Sean
Penn , the Festival President of Cannes Film Festival asked for a special
screening of the Third Wave- a film shot in Sri Lanka that recorded
one of the greatest natural disasters in human history. The newspaper
said, “The film tells the story of Peraliya, a Tsunami ravaged
village rebuilt by independent volunteers – an effort brought to
world attention in 2005 by Metro’s James Ellis, Andy Blackmore
and Juliet Coombe.”
The Third Wave was shot by Allison Thompson and Oscar Gubermati during
their stay in Sri Lanka. They have announced that the film will be screened
in Britain this year and the profits will go back to Sri Lanka.
The Focus records how the Metro team James, Andy and Juliet started
working:
“Within minutes Andy and I (James) had picked up hammers. We weren’t
the only ones. As word got around, originally through metro people flocked
to Peraliya, in droves to help.
“Andy returned to Britain and replaced by Juliet. We cajoled friends
to come and helped and begged and scraped for money in an effort to
rebuild the village.
“Not everything worked but Peraliya was the first village in Sri
Lanka to do many things after the tsunami. It was the first to have
a working medical centre, the first to reopen a school, the first to
rebuild its houses, and first to have its own tsunami warning and management
centre. Here a monitoring station relays messages to the villages via
loudspeakers- just in case that bogeyman ever comes back.”
James Ellis further wrote in the Metro of how they found Peraliya :
“Metro photographer Andy Blackmore and myself had been in Sri Lanka
for four days in early January 2005 when we came across such disaster.
Our original remit had been to track and help the aid efforts in the
Southern suburbs of Colombo of a small group of volunteers sent by gap
year travel company i to i . While all major aid organizations had been
warning against independent relief efforts, it was clear that they were
needed- whether you could give first aid, build a house, or simply pick
up bricks, hand out food or simply put an arm round someone. As Sean
Penn said when introducing the Third Wave anyone with two legs and a
dollar in their pocket could help.
The columnist and his photographer, decided to hire a car and went
down South and finally reached Peraliya and describes as follows: “
Peraliya was already a star in the news, the tsunami’s ground zero
if you like the disaster’s iconic images : the mangled red carriages
of the Queen of the Seas (Samudra Devi) - the Colombo-Galle Express
train that had been swept off its tracks by the second wave.
“Around those carriages, whole forests of palm trees were uprooted,
train tracks were mangled, like an angry giant had been playing with
a toy and remnants of clothes were strewn everywhere. Then there were
the houses. There weren’t any. On December 4 2004, there had been
420, there were now ten; 110 families had vanished, with more than 2000
dead.
“Two main buildings remained, the school –precariously on
its last legs –and the school library which was now an impromptu
clinic and the nerve centre of a fledging aid effort headed by A.Dharmadasa
and four indepndent volunteers:Alison Thompson, Oscar Gubernati, Donny
Patterson and Bruce French.
“Alison and Oscar were couple. Bruce and Donny had been picked
up along the way. Driving down the coast a few days earlier than us,
they had come across Peraliya decide to stop and see what is happening.
They were as surprised as us to find that, despite all the coverage,
all those images of the train there was no one there to help.
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