Film de jacques audiard dheepan

2015 film

Dheepan is a 2015 French crime drama film directed by Jacques Audiard and co-written by Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debré. The film was partly inspired by Montesquieu's Persian Letters, as well as the 1971 film Straw Dogs, with guidance from Antonythasan Jesuthasan, who stars as the title character.

The film tells the story of three Tamil refugees who flee the civil war-ravaged Sri Lanka and come to France, in the hope of reconstructing their lives. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It was later shown in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Plot

Sivadhasan is a Tamil Tiger soldier during the last days of the Sri Lankan Civil War. After the armed conflict resolves, his side loses, and he is forced to move to a refugee camp. There he decides to move to France to take a fresh chance at life. However, in order to secure political asylum, he requires a convincing cover story. He is given the passport of a dead man, Dheepan Natarajan, and pairs with people he barely knows, posing as his family. Along with his supposed wife, Yalini, and his supposed 9-year-old daughter, Illayaal, they get on a ship bound for Paris.

Upon arrival, he lands a job as a resident caretaker and starts building a new life in a banlieue housing project named Le Pré. He winds up as a caretaker of a rough housing project controlled by drug dealers (filmed on location in the peaceful project of La Coudraie, in the suburban city of Poissy). The new home turns out to be another conflict zone for him. Shootouts between rival drug gangs terrify Yalini and Illayaal as they try to fit into their roles as mother and daughter. Yalini is pressured to accept a job as a nurse-maid to the father of the local drug lord.

Sivadhasan attends to his duties in spite of the chaos that surrounds him but is drawn into the fight. Caught in the crossfi

Belle McIntyre

There has arguably not been a time when the issue of refugees and immigration has been more prominent in the cultural consciousness. And yet the vastness of the issue, the divergent responses and acrimonious debates surrounding it has produced a sort
of numbness to the fact that it is about individual human beings and not just a hot button topic. The fact that there are so many different causes in so many places, makes it practically impossible for politicians, policy makers and pundits to fit it into a sound bite for a public that has the attention span of a plant. Therefore, it often gets distilled into 

an “issue” and lacks the human component. 

However, for a filmmaker this is catnip. There is undeniable drama in any story which involves such dire personal consequences. This is why it is such fertile ground and so imperative for the rest of us. There are millions of stories out there and voices which need to be heard. The collateral benefit of putting a specific face on it and telling that story is that we, the audience, can be engaged as individuals and be reminded that there is a human side which deserves our attention. It is such a perfect microcosm for exploring the best and the worst of ourselves and being aware of situations that most of us can probably not imagine. 

In Jacques Audiard’s film the circumstances unspool gradually as to why these people are in a refugee camp. They are desperately fleeing northern Sri Lanka in the wake of the fall of the Tamil Tigers after years of civil war. The film zeroes in on three refugees with falsified papers who must impersonate a family consisting of a husband, Dheepan, wife, and 9-year old daughter to conform to the documents of a deceased family. We see Yalini, the “wife” frantically searching the camp for an orphan girl the right age to come with them and pose as their “daughter”. When she finally finds Illayal, the fake family unit is complete. They are also complete strang

In Dheepan, the latest film released last weekend from the revered French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone), a Tamil soldier arrives at a refugee camp in the final days of the Sri Lankan Civil War. In order to more easily gain political asylum, he aligns himself with a single woman and a 9-year-old girl, and the three of them are relocated to France to start a new life together.

The tension and discomfort are palpable as the three strangers learn to live with one another while contending with hostile locals in a dangerous neighborhood. Writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan (also known by his pseudonym, Shobasakthi) stars as the title character in this partially autobiographical role—he, too, is a former child soldier from the war—in this dark, contemplative drama that won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. While at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, I spoke through translators with Jesuthasan and Audiard about Dheepan’s real-life inspirations, its timely political backdrop, and how Martin Scorsese inspired the climactic final scene.

Jacques, what drew you to telling this story?

Jacques Audiard: It goes back five years ago. At the end of shooting A Prophet … I wanted to do a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs with immigrants in a housing project. So I gave up on the idea of Straw Dogs—I didn’t totally give it up, but put it on the side—and it became another story … The starting point—the spark of the movie—is this idea of the fake family—this concept of the fake family. And, slowly, love [enters] the story. At the end, there was a bit of everything: There was a bit of Straw Dogs; there was a bit of a love story,  a bit of the fake family.

And Shoba, you were once part of the Tamil Tigers [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. How much of your story wound up in the movie, and how much did you colla