"Jacques Christian Soulié — In Memoriam" — A Film Tribute

Filmed in 2023 in Mirabel, near Toulouse, and expanded with footage shot again in 2026 in the same places, this documentary portrait gives the floor to Dr Jacques Soulié (†2025), French psychiatrist and co-founder of the Suriyakantha Centre.

Filmed in 2023 in Mirabel, near Toulouse, and expanded with footage shot again in 2026 in the same places, this documentary portrait gives the floor to Dr Jacques Soulié (†2025), French psychiatrist and co-founder of the Suriyakantha Centre.

Without notes, the questions remaining off-camera, Jacques Soulié retraces, in this conversation at once personal and intimate — with an eloquence and a clarity of argument still perfectly intact —, the first part of a life that began on a farm in the Tarn-et-Garonne and ended some 8,500 kilometres away, in the highlands of central Sri Lanka. Kandy, the tropical island's second city, would be where he made his home for the last thirty years of his life.

A snowbound childhood and a bird killed with a sling — a remorse that would one day resonate with the Buddhist spirituality he discovered decades later; the frugal rural world of a Catholic, almost pre-industrial South-West; a mother who could not help him with his homework but who, always at his side, sustained him; a father returned from internment, ill, dead at forty-four — a captivity, then a passing, so little spoken of within the family circle. Then the wish, surprising to those who heard it as to himself, to enrol at the bourgeois school in town, against a social determinism rooted deep in the land. And, at the close of this prelude, a film seen at the cinema one moped evening, after which medicine became more than a profession: a way of leaving.

What emerges is less a life story than a meditation on rootedness and departure, on loyalty to one's class and emancipation from it: in a man born of a lineage that had moved, for generations, within a radius of twenty kilometres, a confused desire, as early as it was irrepressible, not to stand still. Yet this is not the triumphant, score-settling or clinical testimony of a class defector in the contemporary — and fashionable — sense of the term. No desire, here, to put memory on trial. It is the telling of the journey of a man who went so far almost without knowing it — and who perhaps understands, after the fact, that he never left. He calls as his witness the majestic century-old oak at the bottom of the garden, which has "seen everything, sensed everything".

Neither regret nor triumph: a story as unpredictable as life, and one that never turns it into a thesis.

The film premiered on 25 July 2026, at the tribute evening held in Kandy to mark the first anniversary of Jacques Soulié's death, in the presence of His Excellency Rémi Lambert, Ambassador of France to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and of Chandra Wickramasinghe, founder of Connaissance de Ceylan and Thema Collection.

Direction, camera and editing: Janaka Samarakoon Drone footage: Joséphine B. Production: artworks! productions & Suriyakantha Centre for Art and Culture Running time: 22 minutes — French, with English subtitles