Malini Fonseka and Vinjaya Kamaratunga acted together in 41 films, and The Wasps are Here (1978) is one of their pairings. Fonseka is a young girl engaged to a young fisherman and Kamaratunga is the indolent aristocrat who courts her. His family takes over the market for her village’s fish. The encounter between the village and urban business methods has tragic consequences as the activist filmmaker, Dharmasena Pathiraja, shows how traditional Sri Lankan society struggles to cope with the challenges of modernity and ethnic violence. In real life Kamaratunga married the daughter of Sri Lanka’s aristocratic political family in this same year, a cinematic prince becoming political royalty. His wife became president of the country, but his own foray into politics ended tragically with his assassination in 1988.