More than half a century separates the literary works of colonial administrator, Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) and the internationally acclaimed films of Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries (1919 - ). This paper will discuss what is an encounter of the unusual kind between an ill-publicized novel belonging to Ceylon’s already somewhat meagre repertory of English language colonial literature, and its translated screen adaptation. Through what processes of reconstruction did a Sinhala-speaking film emerge in the 1970s from a novel written in English at the turn of the 20th century ?