Sumitra Peries' 1978 'The Girls' returns to view — a quiet Sri Lankan gem the global canon forgot

On 8 July 2026, a 1978 Sri Lankan film that almost no international audience has seen — and that even most Sri Lankan audiences only half-remember — quietly re-entered the conversation. The Guardian's film desk published a feature-length review of Sumitra Peries' The Girls (Yahalu Yeheli), describing it as "an understated gem of Sri Lankan cinema" and one of the most poignant coming-of-age romances the country has produced. The film follows two teenage sisters and a courtship conducted almost entirely in the language of glances, silences and shared domestic labour. Its passions are real. Its words rarely arrive. That is the picture's point, and the reason it has aged rather than yellowed.

For a publication that tracks where culture and capital meet, the reappearance matters less as a single review than as a small piece of evidence about how cinematic canons get written — and how they get corrected. The Girls sat in semi-archive for nearly five decades because it was made in the wrong place, in the wrong language, by a director whose name did not travel, and about a subject — female interiority in postcolonial South Asia — that the global festival circuit only learned to programme in volume after the turn of the millennium. The Guardian's piece is the latest in a slow, decade-long drift of such titles back into view.

A film built on what cannot be said

Peries directs her own screenplay, which is built almost entirely around restraint. The sisters, played by non-professional leads in what reads as a deliberate choice rather than a budgetary compromise, move through a Colombo household arranged around an extended family, a kitchen, and the unspoken rules of who may speak to whom. The romantic interest — a young man from a family the household considers unsuitable — appears mostly at the edges of frames, in courtyards, in half-open doorways. The film refuses the melodramatic register that 1970s South Asian popular cinema had made its default; instead, it works in long takes and the grammar of domestic routine. When something does happen — a glance held a beat too long, a cup of tea left on a windowsill — it registers like weather moving through a room.

The Guardian's reviewer, writing on 8 July 2026, frames the picture as "laden with passions that can't be spoken aloud." That is also, more or less, a description of what Sri Lankan cinema was trying to do at the moment Peries was making it: find a local idiom for the inner life of women whose lives were being reshaped by post-independence urbanisation, by the slow drift of the Sinhala-Buddhist cultural project, and by the expectations of extended-family households that remained politically and economically central even as Colombo modernised around them.

The counter-canon problem

The mainstream critical canon of South Asian cinema — the version that travels through Criterion, the BFI, the Brooklyn Academy, and the syllabi of university film departments — has long been centred on Indian titles: Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, Mrinal Sen's city films, the parallel-cinema movement of the 1970s, and a smaller but persistent cycle of Sri Lankan diaspora work. The Girls belongs to a different stream: a generation of Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi filmmakers who made pictures in the 1970s and 1980s with regional funding, regional casts, and minimal international distribution infrastructure. Their work tends to surface decades later, often when a critic on a major Western desk goes looking for the local inflection point of a global genre — the Sri Lankan answer to Romeo and Juliet, the Sri Lankan Maurice, the Sri Lankan answer to a question a festival programmer only recently learned to ask.

That is not a conspiracy. It is how distribution, language and capital have always arranged the canon. But it produces a structural distortion: a 1978 film by a working Sri Lankan director with a female lead and a female director of photography is treated as a rediscovery, when in fact it was, at the time, an unremarkable entry in a working filmography. Peries continued directing into the 1990s; her name is known in Sri Lankan film culture. The reason a Guardian reader in 2026 is reading about her for the first time is not that the film was hidden. It is that the pipes carrying South Asian cinema to international audiences have, for most of the period since 1978, simply not run through Colombo.

What the picture is actually about

Stripped of the recovery framing, The Girls is doing fairly conventional things — courtship, family pressure, the choice between a respectable match and a desired one. What is unusual is how much weight Peries puts on the labour of waiting. The sisters cook, sweep, fold laundry, hang saris. The film spends real time on these actions, and the camera treats them as serious. The romance, when it surfaces, is less an event than a residue — the sense that the household's daily rhythms have been quietly rearranged by the presence of someone who may not stay. It is, in this sense, closer to a Chantal Akerman interior than to the commercial Sinhala cinema of its decade.

That makes it readable, in 2026, as a feminist text without anyone having to insist on it. The film's argument is in its editing: the women work; the men, when they appear, are mostly waiting for the women to finish working. The romance is what happens in the gaps.

Stakes for the present

For Sri Lankan audiences, the return of The Girls matters less as a curiosity than as a corrective. The country has a richer film history than international coverage has tended to acknowledge, and Peries is one of its central figures. For global audiences, the film sits inside a wider pattern of South Asian film history being slowly reassembled — a reassembly driven less by nostalgic reissue houses than by streaming-era curators willing to programme pictures that older distribution models could not monetise. The economics matter. A 1978 film without stars and without a festival pedigree was, in the VHS and DVD era, effectively un-revenueable. In a streaming environment, where a thoughtful two-hour film can sit on a regional shelf indefinitely at near-zero marginal cost, the math changes. The Girls is what that math produces.

The nuance worth holding onto: a single Guardian review is not a revival, and a streaming shelf is not a canon. The film is one title, by one director, in a national cinema that produced dozens of comparable pictures in the same period. What the review confirms is not that Peries has been saved, but that the gatekeeping mechanisms which kept her out of international sight have begun, slowly, to admit her. The rest is a question of which other titles follow her through the door.

Desk note: Monexus framed this as a story about how canons get assembled — and how South Asian film history, in particular, has been thinned by the distribution economics of the last fifty years — rather than as a stand-alone film review. The Guardian's review is treated as the news peg, not the story itself.