Vimukthi Jayasundara was born in southern Sri Lanka. He was a journalist, film critic and writer for the screen, and he attended the Institute for Film and Television in Pune, India.
After making The Land of Silence, a documentary in black and white about the victims of the civil war which was selected for several festivals in Marseilles, Rotterdam and Berlin, Vimukthi Jayasundara studied in France at the Fresnoy School of Art before becoming a resident at the Cinefondation of the Festival de Cannes in 2003.
In 2004 he directed his first feature, The Forsaken Land. Vimukthi Jayasundara's picture, which took the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or for best first film, is done with sparse dialogue and haunting tableaux of the isolated rural landscape. "Land" has some of the strange poetry of Ingmar Bergman's great 1968 anti-war film Shame, but it's a more cryptic, exotic work, burningly immediate yet imbued with some of the quality of timeless fable. Only 27, Jayasundara seems a moviemaker of high promise. His Forsaken Land, a work of surprising sophistication and cinematic eloquence, signaled the arrival of a major international film talent.
He is the first Sri Lankan who became to win the prestigious Camera d’Or.
Vimukthi Jayasundara was bestowed with the 1CKala Kirthi" title by the President of Sri Lanka.

Filmography
 2015 Sulanga Gini Aran (Dark in the White Light)
 2012 Light in the Yellow Breathing Space (Short) - Jeonju Digital Project
 2011 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (segment)
 2011 Chatrak (Mushrooms)
 2009 Ahasin Wetei (Between Two Worlds)
 2005 Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land)
 2003 Empty for Love (Short)

 2002 The Land of Silence (short)

 1996 Thibiri Dela (short)