COUNTDOWN 2026: 1-Minute Film Night

The second iteration of Countdown was screened on 7 February 2026 at Barefoot Gallery, bringing audiences together for an evening of collective viewing and exchange. This year’s edition, Countdown 2026: 1-Minute Film Night, was presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka. Countdown emerged from a desire to create space to come together, to critically and creatively explore the moving image, a medium that is deeply embedded in our everyday lives.

 
Artists working across a range of creative practices were invited to experiment with video as a tool rather than a fixed discipline. This year, 30 1-Minute films were presented, showcasing diverse approaches that span narrative, animation, experimental work, and performance. The programme featured both digital methods such as digital animation and AI-generated imagery, as well as analogue processes including stop-motion and hand-drawn animation.
 
The constraint of 60 seconds was central to the project, encouraging play, experimentation, and creative risk-taking, particularly among artists engaging with film and media for the first time. The format continues a long-standing tradition of 1-minute film festivals that exist globally, including within visual arts and film school contexts. Countdown also underscores the importance of collective viewing, opening up dialogue around how audiences experience, interpret, and process audio-visual media.
 
All films from the screening are available to view on this website for a period of three months, (until 7th May 2026) We can’t wait to see how Countdown continues to grow, and we’re already looking forward to the next edition.
  • (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

  • Touching the Outside From Within

    Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah

    The visuals and sound explore emotional and expressive connections between inner and outer surfaces and various boundaries natural and man-made, negative and positive space, masculinity and femininity, land and ocean, and vegetarian and non-vegetarian. The work merges inner being with external truth, reflecting the tensions, contradictions, and interdependence that exist between these layered physical, cultural, and psychological realms.

     

  • Salagamayo

    Disharath Seneviratne
    The Salagamayo, renowned for their fine gold-woven textiles, brought exceptional weaving traditions from South India during the reign of Vijaya Bahu III. Their legacy of crafting for royalty endures through generations. This piece reflects women spinning cotton yarn and creating handloom weavings, where each pattern narrates cultural identity, dedication, resilience, and timeless artistry.

  • For Those That Gave Me Play

    Dilsiri Welikala

    A tribute to those who shaped my childhood and helped me dream.

  • Do Not Laugh

    Creative Chaos Kids
    Do Not Laugh is a one minute film built around a simple rule. One child sits in front of a fixed camera and must not laugh. Around them, the others do everything they can to make that impossible.
     
    Made with the Creative Chaos bunch, the film captures the moment just before laughter breaks through.
     

  • My Mama Is An Explorer

    Hasna Hussain and Siobhan D'Almeida
    Foreign remittances are a lifeline for our economy. But the human cost, especially for mothers and children, remains largely unaddressed. This stop motion animation explores the experiences of a mother working abroad and the son she left behind, from a child’s perspective, and invites the audience to consider the realities and needs of thousands of such families across Sri Lanka.
     

  • Perfected Self

    Asitha Amarakoon
    This visual narrative allegorises the impact of social media on human behaviour and productivity. The golden leaf-crown symbolises childhood fantasies and the expectations of youth inside a virtual reality, where they drift away from real life and purpose, while trying to perfect themselves to be seen by others.

  • Treasure Tree

    Irushi Tennekoon, Shenuka Corea, Sachithra Beligammana
    As their family banyan tree is about to be cut down, two siblings chat about a forgotten legend - one that includes a hidden treasure and guardian spirits.
     

  • I Love Bugs & Why I'm Scared of Dying

    Drew de Silva
    The following is a series of six experimental shorts exploring entomophobia through non-traditional animated media. From textural scans, to screen print, this exploration pushes the bounds of what is possible through the medium of animation.

  • Silent Screams in Green Spaces

    P.G. Chathushi Buddhika Premasiri
    Witness the stark contrast of nature's beauty against human destruction. Nature's harmony drowned by the city's din: horns blaring, crackers bursting, factories smoking. Beauty choked by pollution's grasp. A mirror to our neglect. Forests weep, sky darken, animals dying. A symphony of chaos drowns the song of the earth. Will we act before it's too late?
     

  • The Warrior and The Bee

    Muvindu Binoy
    When the island's fiercest warrior giant finds his aim blocked by a tiny, happy bee, he drops his sword forever to find peace as a gardener in a hidden paradise.
     

  • Sunrise behind Siripada

    Dr Kavan Ratnatunga
    Sunrise Behind Siripada. Original taken on 2021 March 16 06:22. Natural Sound of the Birds and wind and voice of onlookers, Weather permitting this event is visible from any location with a clear view of the eastern horizon on the day of alignment which can be computed easily. It could be a popular Tourist Attraction for Hotels from Kadana to Kaluthara (Video sped up 2.8x, Background Audio at Normal speed.)
     

  • Naadha Rataa

    Ruwani Rajapakse

    Colonial writers dismissed Sinhalese music as “noise,” judging it by Western norms. Yet music and noise are culturally defined, shaped by power and listening practices. Though it may lack fixed time signatures or rhythms by Western standards, it holds its own sonic logic. This is an attempt to represent that sound differently.

     

  • Too Early

    Rivindu Samadhith Perera
    While passing a lottery agent, Kavin remembers the lottery he had bought the day before, the 07th of January, and decides to check his luck. Looking for the winning numbers, he notices that the numbers on his lottery ticket match the numbers on the sheet of winning numbers. But the date, the 06th of January. Results, too early.
     

  • Winadiyakne (It's Just a Minute)

    Vinul Perera
    In one minute, the world breathes, moves, and loses. Facts unfold while she commits a robbery in the same sixty seconds. A film about time, contrast, and what can be stolen before a minute runs out.
     

  • Presley

    Vishi

    A brief reflection on love, absence, and a street dog named Presley. Dedicated to my Presley, and all the Presley’s on our planet, and maybe other planets too.

  • Kuvali Takes a Minute

    Nisala Saheed

    Take a minute with me to rest your tired soul. The hustle can wait. The resistance cannot.

  • Fear of Dark

    Mohammed Thajudeen Fathima Rukshana

    Fear of Dark is a performance art video set in total darkness, lit only by a candle. Drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the work confronts fear and illusion through fragile light. By carrying the flame, I reclaim agency as a woman, transforming vulnerability into resistance and asserting visibility, knowledge, and power within imposed darkness.

  • නිවන්:Just a regular conversation in a ඉලව් ගෙදර

    Sri Jayathilake

    This film visualizes a recorded conversation. Over the course of a night spent at a funeral (ඉලව් ගෙදර), a man drifts into the memory of an old incident. Fragments of recollection surface, shaped by silence, darkness, and time.

  • When I was 16

    Rinoshan Susiman
    When I Was 16 is a one-minute moving image reflecting my time in a seminary, where media access was denied and vision shaped by power. Using the metaphor of a frog in a well, the film reflects controlled narratives, isolation, and a society distanced from lived realities during conflict years.
     

  • A body, crossing

    Minal Naomi Wickrematunge
    A body, crossing is an on-going exploration of maps and borders that are etched into my skin. This project maps fault-lines of ancestry, migration and belonging. It's a map drawn in breath and blood, a reclamation of the body as both geography and archive. 
     

  • The Breathless Haunting

    Aqilah N. Naleem & M. Khaled Naleem
    "The Beautiful Haunting" is a cinematic meditation on the existential weight of adulthood. Through grainy, nostalgic visuals of fleeting landscapes, it captures the “slow, quiet violence” of losing childhood certainty. The piece explores the pressure to evolve amidst the wreckage of past choices, ultimately reframing the prime of one’s life as a breathless, lingering haunting of the self.
     

  • Fruition

    Ananya Perera, Vinaya Perera and Sandadev Liyanage
    A blind girl ventures from her village into a forbidden forest, seeking to reclaim her sight from the mysterious eye trees. The narrative is inspired by the ignorance that pervades the world and how people willingly remain blind to it. The film uses symbolism, including the biblical fruit of knowledge and nods to 'Creation of Adam' and 'Snow White'. ‘Fruition’ alludes to becoming, transformation, and the acceptance of knowledge, whether it is actively sought or forcibly encountered.
     

  • Life is haunted

    Thasunee Pinipa Samarasinghe
    A short animation that shows the bitter truth of life.
     

  • Direct Sunlight

    Aaron Micheal Seneviratne
    A spectral animatronic crowned by a traditional Kandyan Yaka mask finds its way into the innocent sanctuary of a village man, creeping towards him in the darkness to devour him whole. This is the silent dominance of Artificial Intelligence made flesh; a visual poem on the dissolution of originality in a mechanized age. Witness the quiet death of identity, drowned in a world of digital slop.
     

  • Ammage Redda, Rathu!

    Savin Edirisinghe
    Ammage Redda, Rathu! is a slice of life exploring how tiny inconveniences and differences between people snowball into conflict. Pressured by society, deadlines, money, and noise, their egos flare faster than reason. Arguments escalate, voices rise, doors slam until silence reveals the quiet victim: love itself, bruised, unnoticed, yet paying the highest price. Within marriage, everyone loses something precious daily.
     

  • The Breakdown

    Joshua Weerasingham, Ruchith Ranasinghe & Sandamini Senanayake
    A voice note turns the night’s journey inward, revealing a relationship rooted in idealisation instead of truth.
     

  • Making of my Gentleman

    Kitty Ritig
    “I am part of the journey that turns him into the man he is meant to be.”
    Through acts of making and fixing, femininity becomes complicit in producing “acceptable” masculinity, where desire is no longer instinctive but something restrained and maintained.
    Should we question its practicality, or surrender to the bittersweetness of feminine naivety?
     

  • ක

    Manuja Mallikarachchi
    You can tell someone anything, and sometimes the only reply you get is a ‘k’
     

  • A love letter to my friend trying to make it in the imperial core

    Mayun Kaluthantri
    Idiosyncratic hyperlocal encounters meet the universal by deeply personal themes of migration for better opportunity in this video poem that is stitched with moving images from passing and unmediated encounters saved on Mayun’s phone camera roll, narrated by text pulled from a journal entry in preparation for a voice note to a friend who had recently moved to Amsterdam and are struggling with it, especially psychologically.
     

  • Ellena Siyalla Rambutan Nove (Not Everything that Hangs is Rambutan)

    Malinda Jayasinghe
    Sculpted testicles are suspended by a chain inside a tyre and set ablaze. The burning tyre evokes extrajudicial violence associated with Sri Lanka’s history of torture, while the emasculated sculpture symbolises how patriarchy and state power are ritualised, normalised, and Spectacularised. The video, set to a classic Sinhala folk song about a flower garland, underscores the absurdity of violence.