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.Featuring novelist and former Tamil Tiger child soldier Antonythasan Jesuthasan in the lead role, 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 shown in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
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, 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 housing project in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, a northeastern suburb of Paris, which turns out to be another conflict zone for him.
