So it is in that sense a very Canadian story,” Selvadurai said. These are the people who walk our streets.
It’s our (Sri Lanka’s) national story, it’s the story of people who are persecuted in their land and end up here.
“It’s the story of so many people who come to this country. “Funny Boy,” Canada’s official entry into this year’s Academy Award Best International Feature Film category, doesn’t take place in Canada and it’s only in the film’s final moments that a beleaguered family of refugees arrive in frigid temperatures at Pearson International Airport.īut Shyam Selvadurai, who wrote the award-winning 1994 novel the movie is based on, as well as the screenplay with veteran filmmaker Deepa Mehta, would argue that the story about forbidden love, set in a time of sectarian violence and social upheaval in Sri Lanka, is very much a Canadian story.
