FOREWORD

THE BEGINNING OF THE PATH

Santhi P. Jayasekera is a truly unique personality. Being a native of the Republic Of Sri Lanka, he has been living constantly in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1981, where he graduated from the State University of Telecommunications n.a. M. A. Bonch-Bruevich (Leningrad electrotechnical Institute n.a. Bonch-Bruevich) in 1987.

 Shanti P. Jayasekera is a founder and a permanent director of the International University of Fundamental Studies (IUFS), created by him in St.Petersburg in 1998, and since 2007 he has been the President of the Intergovernmental Higher Academic Council

IHAC, today the International Higher Academic Council (IHAC) performs as the Association of the Word Scientists. Under the guidance of Shanti P. Jayasekera, IUFS and IHAC have become the scientific and organizational centers, recognized in the modern world as the institutions paving fundamentally new paths in science and culture.

 Shanti P. Jayasekera is continuously and successfully engaged in diverse research and creative activity in various fields of knowledge (philosophy, history, jurisprudence, informatics, international security, medicine, cultural studies etc.).
It is the insatiable and constant creative impulse that brought Santhi P.Jayasekara to St. Petersburg Institute of Cinema and Television, from which he graduated in 2015, having created the original film “True love” as a screenwriter and a director (Professor S.Ovcharov was a supervisor). In this film, for the first time in the world cinema, all the characters are people with “physical disabilities” (blind, deaf, hard-of-hearing), and the entire drama of the film is built on their very complex and intense relationship. True love plays here a crucial role. The film shows that all the people have truly inlimitless spiritual possibilities that make their lives full and wonderful, and love is really powerful.

The book has a meaningful and a promising title “How to become a film maker” that is consistently and convincingly revealed to the book’s structure and content, fully justifying its name.

The structures and contents of the book are both original.

Shanti P. Jayasekera rightly believes that it is possible to become a real film director by understanding the history of the world cinema in a creative way. The originality of Shanti P. Jayasekera’s approach to such stories is that he gives a deliberately selective history of the world cinema (USA, Russia, France, Italy, Germany, India) as an individualized process, the history, objectively and subjectively important for the ongoing development of world cinema and especially for the professional development of of Shanti P. Jayasekera as a film maker. His experience in this regard is typologically significant.

The book provides the expressive portraits-sketches of the outstanding figures of the world cinema, which had particularly noticeable effect, as Shanti P. Jayasekera believes himself, on him as to the director. Among them are Charlie Chaplin, Tonino Guerra, Emir Kusturitsa, etc.

The peculiarity of the narration in the book that is rich in material variation is expressed in the fact that the author firstly gives some preliminary sketch and then a detailed picture of what the author narrates repeatedly in detail in the future. This makes different information provided by the author more impressive and consistently memorable.

Especially expressive and original in the book are the essays on the portraits of Charley Chaplin and Tonino Guerra. Shanti P. Jayasekera got to know Tonino Guerra personally and the whole essay-portrait of the well-known writer is imbued with subtle lyricism and even a unique intimacy.

Considering contemporary cinema and especially television, from the point of view of their technical perfection, Shanti P. Jayasekera astutely notes that new technical tools play an important aesthetic and creative-visual role in this case, allowing to create emotional and intellectual effects, previously inaccessible for cinema.

Shanti P. Jayasekera emphasizes the ambiguous role of money for cinema production. Without money the production itself would be impossible, and, at the same time, the investor’s money creates the dependence on them in the entire filmmaking process, including the conceptual-creative process. There must be a genuine interaction of both sides, beneficial for the filmmaking.

The Director’s profession may require the truly unique historical knowledge. The author demonstrates it clearly when talking about the special and possible investor (Principality of Seborga) for the production of films, conceived by director Shanti P. Jayasekera.

The artistic story of the creation of Shanti P. Jayasekera’s film “True love” takes a special place in the book. It reveals the entire inside mechanism of cinema appearance: from the script up to the on-screen demonstrations. It is also typologically instructive and even not only for young directors. It presents the process of creating the script, and you can find the assessments of the finished film by its various and influential audience, of course deservedly positive.

Rich in the most varied and instructive material, written in a lively and entertaining way, the book by Shanti P. Jayasekera “How to become a film maker,” will be perceived with interest and benefit by the experts in various fields and a wide range of a reader interested in cinema and the process of its creation.

February 6, 2016

Saint-Petersburg
Prof. Iesuitov A.N.
Grand doctor of philosophy, doctor of philology, professor, academician