Prasanna Vithanage's film Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka (With You, Without You) is to be screened at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF), organisers announced last night.

The New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) will celebrated independent, art house, alternate, and Diaspora films from/about/connected to the Indian subcontinent (May 5 – 10) at the SoHo Tiffin Junction.

Dedicated to bringing these films to a New York audience, the festival will feature 34 screenings (23 narrative, 11 documentary) –all seen for the first time in New York City.

Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka set in post war Sri Lanka, brings us close to two characters who collide quite accidentally, and through them we experience the deep and seemingly unbridgeable chasm that conflict almost always creates. Will love help them cross the bridge? Or will the past continue to color the present? A man and a woman from the two ends of the thirty-year-old bloody civil war in Sri Lanka discover that the color of love is blue, and life, shades of grey.

Born in 1962, Prasanna Vithanage's opus of six previous films has made him one of Sri Lanka's leading filmmakers with a worldwide critical and popular reputation. He began his career in the 1980's as a theatre director. He translated into Sinhala and directed two plays before setting out as a filmmaker in 1992. His fourth feature "Purahanda Kaluwara" (Death on a Full Moon Day 1997) won the Grand Prix at the Amiens Film Festival. While also devoting serious time and effort to the education and training of young people in the art and business of filmmaking, Vithanage revisited theatre in time spent between making movies. In 2008 Prasanna produced the hit comedy "Machan", an international co-production, directed by Uberto Pasolini. "Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka" (With You, Without You) is his seventh feature.