Akash Sunethkumara

Akash Sunethkumara (Akash Sk) is a Sri Lankan filmmaker, writer and actor.

Early life
Akash Sunethkumara was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He is an alumnus of St. Nicholas' International College Negombo and Staffordshire University.

High School Junkies
In 2016, Sunethkumara formed a filmmaking collective with a group of friends titled High School Junkies. Together, he created his first publicly released short film EIDETIC which was his Masters thesis project. A low-budgeted short of $300, EIDETIC screened at various film festivals including San Diego Comic-Con's Independent Film Festival. In 2018, he directed a short horror titled The Summoning. Later in 2019, he released a mini-follow up to The Summoning titled The Friend which was also published on Crypt TV. Sunethkumara directed The Knight Out in 2020, a project marketed as an "action musical" which merged the concepts of a music video with martial arts action.

In 2022, Sunethkumara helmed Temporal, a time-travel sci-fi short film about a physicist who races against time to prevent the death of his girlfriend. The film required eight months of work to complete and was experimental to determine how well they could "localize a western sci-fi concept". It was the first project that Sunethkumara and the team had done in collaboration with an external party and also the first project where they collaborated with veteran Sri Lankan actor Lakshman Mendis. Sumner Forbes of Film Threat stated "I was mightily impressed by the production value that Sunethkumara brings to bear in this 30-minute film. The director never loses sight of the film’s strengths, which are the entertaining temporal contradictions that come from leaping back into the recent past, recalling Shane Carruth’s Primer." Sunethkumara collaborated in 2023 with Sri Lankan actress Yureni Noshika on Teddy, a short film that tackled the "constant realities for so many in relationships and marriages not just in Sri Lanka but across the globe".

Junkyard Theory
Sunethkumara started a podcast during the COVID-19 pandemic called Junkyard Theory where he hosts filmmakers from Hollywood on a livestream. The first education platform of its kind in Sri Lanka, it also offers short modular film courses. Sunethkumara has hosted prominent names in the industry such as Louis Leterrier, Mike Knobloch, John Toll, Paul Hirsch, Donald Sylvester, Richard Norton, Joel Crawford and Simon Barry.