Pathiraja Navaratne Wanninayake Mudiyanselage Ranjith Dharmasena[1] (28 March 1943 – 28 January 2018) was a Sri Lankan film director and screenwriter.

Educated at Dharmaraja College, Kandy, Pathiraja graduated from the University of Peradeniya with an honours degree in Sinhala and Western Classical Culture in 1967.

Subsequently he began work as a lecturer in Drama and Performance Arts,[3] and later obtained a PhD in Bengali cinema from Monash University.

[4] He learned the language of cinema from the film society movement, which was popular in Sri Lanka in the early sixties.

[3] 1975's Eya Dan Loku Lamayek was Sri Lanka's entry at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival,[6] winning a Special Diploma for Female Performance in 1976 and the Special award from the peace council of the USSR to be screened at the 18th Venice Film Festival in Bergamo, Italy in 1975.

1980 saw the filming of Para Dige which was shown some time later at UCLA in the Third World Cinema Program and in France and Melbourne.