Travelogue films showing indigenous life in the interwar period, filmed by the British traveller, linguist, spy and author Reginald Teague Jones OBE, who changed his name to Sinclair after his alleged involvement in the massacre of Bolshevik commissars from Baku in the Caucasus in September 1918.

Ceylon. Rice harvesting. Shots of the forest road from Colombo to Kandy; travellers, elephants carrying loads of timber and vegetation. Shots of lake at Kandy (Kiri Muhuda?). Scenes of teapicking. Sequence of man feeding the sacred turtles lake; several turtles seen swimming to a ledge and feeding voraciously from the food laid out for them. Elephants and mahouts in river (shot list: ‘Bathing temple elephants in Mahaweliganga river’); elephants made to perform for camera, splashing, spraying water, posing with tree trunk. Distance shots of Sigiriya rock; followed by overviews of jungle taken from Sigiriya. Jungle views: car driving through clearings, European man (Sinclair?) walking through clearings. Buddhist procession (shot list: ‘Buddhist harvest festival’). Shots of ‘waterlogged forest’. Fishing vessels with outriggers coming into shore (shot list identifies location as Negombo). Anaradhapura: landscape shots, stupas and pagodas. Rock-carved Buddha. Ox-drawn wagons on road to Colombo. Brief shot of rubber plantation, followed by shots of bullock carts. Long sequence of sapphire mining (shot list: ‘Ratnapura. Centre of the sapphire mining.’ [sic]); men stand waist deep in water panning for gems. Further shots of mining activites.

Notes

Catalogue entry by Dr Francis Gooding, AHRC Colonial Film Database 2010.