Rekawa has amazing location shooting and great performances by D. R. Nanayakkara (who later appeared in Temple of Doom as the shaman), Somapala Dharmapriya and N. R. Dias. The version I've seen has added songs to appeal to audiences of that period but there is another version that was presented at Cannes.
Lindsay Anderson comments on it while reviewing the films at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival:
An Italian critic at the Festival Ugo Casiraghi, in L'Unita, Rome, wrote of it as follows:Particularly Rekawa (Line of Destiny) first venture by Ceylon on the international scene and a very successful one with good use of background. A simple story of village life filmed with a winning sensitivity and lyric feeling by another new director, Lester Peries, performed by amateurs (very well), casual in construction, leisural in pace, photography continually seductive-above all a genuine and refreshing picture.
C. A. Lejune wrote of "this strange and lovely film, treasure from Ceylon."Friendly Persuasion" (winner of the Grand Prix) comes to us from a country claiming to have the biggest film industry in the world. Rekawa on the other hand is produced in a country in which the film industry is not even ten years old. We preferred the slow ingenious and sincere Sinhalese film to the Hollywood product.
Lindsay Anderson, the head of the International Jury at the Film Festival, when awarding the Grand Prix, Golden Peacock (prize, for the most humanist director) said:Gamperaliya was a major breakthrough in Sri Lankan cinema refraining from the cliches prominent in popular cinema of the time. It had a lyrical quality towards at it followed the decline in fortune of an aristocratic family over time. P. Heendeniya, Trelicia Gunawardene, Shanthi Lekha, Gamini Fonseka, David Dharmakeerthi, etc.. were all good in their respective roles.
It was good to be able to award the statue of a Grand Prix to that lonely artist of Ceylon, Lester James Peries, whose Changes in the Village" astonished the slavs with its elegiac, near Chekhovian grace.