The Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Dheepan tells an intimate story about the immigrant experience with sympathy and candor. The film stars Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a writer and former Sri Lankan child soldier, as a Tamil Tiger hoping to start a new life in the slums of Paris, but there’s one catch: In order to gain asylum, he must take along a woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and child (Claudine Vinasithamby) and pretend they are his wife and daughter. Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone), Dheepan is a gritty look at poverty, racism, and the unlikely communities that spring up in the darkest of times. Audiard partly drew on Jesuthasan’s own experiences for this drama, which morphs from a tale of survival and family into a tense thriller as Dheepan soon learns that the war zone he’s left behind has, in its own way, come back to haunt him in this strange new land.
