Killing the Travellers(2025)

Storyline

During Sri Lanka's brutal civil war, a group of travelers making ordinary journeys on roads near Kattankudy were abducted and killed in what became known as the Kurukkalmadam Massacre. This documentary uncovers the truth behind those horrifying events, giving voice to a tragedy that has long been buried in the chaos of war. It's a powerful reminder that behind every conflict, real people paid the ultimate price simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“When traveling became a death sentence.”

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Trivia

• Kattankudy, the town central to this documentary, is a densely populated Muslim-majority enclave in Sri Lanka's Batticaloa District — its roads became particularly dangerous during the civil war as multiple armed factions competed for control of the eastern province.
• The Kurukkalmadam area sits in the buffer zone between Tamil and Muslim communities in the east, making it a flashpoint during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the LTTE and Muslim self-defence groups came into violent conflict alongside the broader war.
• Director Baazir Kaleelur Rahman approaches a chapter of the Sri Lankan civil war that rarely receives attention in Tamil-language cinema — the violence inflicted on Muslim civilians, a community that was simultaneously caught between the LTTE, the Sri Lankan military, and paramilitaries.
• The film is notable for being a Tamil-language documentary examining atrocities against Sri Lankan Muslims, a perspective that complicates the more familiar Tamil-vs-Sinhalese narrative that dominates most civil war cinema and journalism.
• Documentary filmmaking about the Sri Lankan civil war has historically been dominated by Sinhala or English-language productions; a Tamil-language entry focusing on Muslim victims represents a deliberate effort to reach Tamil-speaking diaspora audiences with a more layered account of the conflict's victims.
• The abductions of travellers on civilian roads — a key subject of the film — were a documented tactic used by multiple factions during the eastern Sri Lanka conflict, targeting people based on ethnicity, religion, or perceived allegiance at makeshift checkpoints.
• By centring survivor testimony and focusing on a specific geographic corridor rather than the war in broad strokes, the film follows a strand of post-war Tamil documentary practice that prioritises localised memory over grand political narrative.