This film's title refers not only to Basil Wright's classic British documentary The Song of Ceylon, but also to a name erased from the map of the world, for there is no longer a country named Ceylon. Invoking the idea of absence, of history withdrawn, Laleen Jayamanne's film pursues a rite of the body. Australian critic Lesley Stern writes: "A Song of Ceylon is not an autobiographical project, but it is a haunted text....it is haunted by a loss. Loss as a process rather than an absolute, as semiosis rather than tragedy. A Song of Ceylon is about losing control, about bodies possessed, demonic. And it is about figuring out these bodies with composure, controlling the excessive by summoning the fetishistic." The image track divulges a spectacle of bodies on a proscenium stage, while a group of figures watches. On the soundtrack, we hear an anthropological text based on a Sri Lankan ritual of spiritual possession. Here, colonialism is victorious at the level of personal history: the body emptied of meaning resorts to rituals of hysteria. But even this wrenching exorcism is destined to fail for there is yet another colonizer to contend with in A Song of Ceylon, the cinematic apparatus.