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Lowering the brow : The films of H.D. Premaratne-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island The face of Sri Lankan films changed in the 1970s. This was due to a number of reasons. Arguably, the most important of them would be the rise of the Sinhala Buddhist rural petty bourgeoisie. Initially represented as side characters, they eventually became protagonists and antagonists in the films which featured them. Lester James Peries’s Golu Hadawatha and Akkara Paha broke ground, in that sense, by casting this milieu in films that not only performed well at the box-office, but also won awards, internationally. These were decades of expansion in the university system and the public sector. The SLFP’s historic win in 1956 had secured for the Sinhala middle-class a place in the sun: that spilt over to the country’s cultural and social landscape. It was in this interregnum, between the Bandaranaike and the Jayewardene years, that pulp fiction became established in ...