The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is structurally a murder mystery, albeit one with significant twist.  In 1989, war photographer Maali Almeida finds himself in a highly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, in a kind of hinterland between life and passage to “The Light” in which he must solve the mystery of his own death in ‘seven moons’ (otherwise known as a week). It’s set against the backdrop of a particularly turbulent period is Sri Lanka’s troubled recent history, in which various factions including the Tamil Tigers, the marxist JVP, and the government’s own death squads are unleashing relatively indiscrimate violence on each other at a shocking rate.