Dheepan

Dheepan

classified 15 S
Film

Please note: This was screened in April 2016

Director
Jacques Audiard
Cast
Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby
Details
115 mins, Subtitled, 2015, France

Jacques Audiard's (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) soul-stirring, powerful Palme d'Or winner follows a former Tamil Tiger soldier as he flees from the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war to begin a new life in a Parisian suburb.

By adopting passports belonging to the dead, Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), a Tamil soldier, pretends that Yalini is his wife and Illayaai is his daughter so they can flee together and find a somewhat easier asylum in France. Once settled in the outskirts of Paris, they must use their hard-won survival skills to navigate their crime-ridden housing estate - and Dheepan in particular finds the spirit of his violent past recurring in the present, as his war wounds are re-opened and the brutality that he's surrounded by consumes him.

A compassionate, provocative film, Dheepan is an inquiring portrait of the immigrant experience in Europe - and particularly of the violent inner world that many victims of war carry with them wherever they go.


× Close

Help us make our website work better for you

Allow analytics cookies Deny analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics to gather information on how our website is used. This helps us to make changes to our website that improve the usefulness and overall experience for our visitors.