Uditha Devapriya

In 1971, the Catholic Church in Sri Lanka officially inaugurated the national office of the International Catholic Organisation for Cinema and Audio-visual (OCIC), under the guidance of the then Archbishop of Colombo, Dr Thomas Benjamin Cooray. The decision was based on reforms within the church aimed at increasing the role of the media, particularly after the Second Vatican Council of 1965, at which a papal decree, Inter mirifica, instructed authorities to make use of all forms of social communication, including the cinema.