Retold World creates powerful documentary films that tackle today’s most urgent stories. With over 20 years of combined experience in filmmaking, conflict and human rights, we specialise on impactful storytelling. As a young production company with offices in Scotland and Sri Lanka, our team brings a wealth of expertise to every project. We work with diverse funding and media partners and collaborate with creative collaborators and consultants around the world to maximise impact. Our projects have been recognised with several awards.
Retold World’s founder is Kannan Arunasalam, a British-Sri Lankan documentary filmmaker who focuses on stories that examine the long-term impact of conflict through a human rights lens. His practice is immersive, rigorous, and reflective. His films have been featured on major platforms like Al Jazeera English, BBC, and The New Yorker. His latest film, ‘Sri Lanka’s Rebel Wife’ (2022), was shortlisted for Best Documentary at the DIG Investigative Film Awards. Kannan’s previous film, ‘The Tent’ (2019), was featured at his British solo exhibition at Yorkshire Contemporary (formerly The Tetley, Leeds. He has taught at Cornell University and is currently working on two feature films, ‘Possible Landscapes’ on the environment in Trinidad & Tobago and ‘Republic of Amnesia’, about the unprecedented protest movement in Sri Lanka. Kannan brings a wealth of experience to Retold World having worked on media content for diverse companies, organisations and institutions around the world.
After graduating from the University of Cambridge with a psychology degree, Kannan Arunasalam began his career as a defamation and human rights lawyer, working on lengthy libel, privacy and copyright cases for a leading media law firm in London. Together with his partners, including David Hooper the respected libel lawyer, they acted for journalists, publishers and broadcasters, defending their right to freedom of expression and giving pre-publication advice on non-fiction books and television news. These cases were the roots of the current trend of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (or SLAPPs) used by individuals, companies and states today to curtail media freedom and block publication. But Kannan wanted to move beyond working vicariously for the media on their human rights issues and to tell stories himself.
Kannan became a journalist working initially for Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s human rights programme and then training with Al Jazeera English’s flagship human interest strand, Witness, under its current Executive Director of Documentaries, Fiona Lawson. He gradually began working for some of the leading international broadcasters and a host of online platforms (The Guardian, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, AOL Originals).
In 2010, Kannan went back to school and a completed masters degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford, with his dissertation focusing on new media and conflict. Soon after, he was asked by Cornell University’s Department of Asian Studies to be its visiting professor teaching ‘media representations of the Sri Lankan conflict’.
