Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He received his BFA from UC San Diego and his MFA from CalArts. He recently completed his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which has received support from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s PRISM programme, and had its world premiere at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, Samarasinghe was also awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023, a Yaddo Residency in 2024, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA - Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Los Angeles Filmforum (2220 Arts), among others. He has received awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Tirana Film Festival, among others.
Rajee Samarasinghe
Rajee Samarasinghe participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Rajee Samarasinghe’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lotus-Eyed Girl | Rajee Samarasinghe | Sri Lanka, USA | 2023 | 6’ | ||
| Ayesha | Yanyu Dong | India, China, USA | 2018 | 20’ | ||
| The Cloud Door | Mani Kaul | India, Germany | 1994 | 29’ | ||
| Burning Star | Joshua Gen Solondz | USA | 2012 | 4’ | ||
| Islands Les îles | Yann Gonzalez | France | 2017 | 24’ | ||
| Threnody | Nathaniel Dorsky | USA | 2004 | 25’ | ||
| The Reminder | Behrouz Rae | USA | 2015 | 1’ | ||
| The Star Eaters | Peggy Ahwesh | USA | 2003 | 24’ | ||
| Cams | Carl-Johan Westregård | Sweden | 2014 | 13’ | ||
| An Example of Lee-Roth Fog, Isolated Under Laboratory Conditions | Ryan Betschart | USA | 2018 | 4’ | ||