Vanessa McMahon

Every year, Cannes Film Festival movie-goers try to predict what the Palm d'Or winner will be. There are always the audience favorites and big buzz films; but more often than not, it's the film least expected to win that rises to the top taking home the highly besought golden palm. This year, that film was DHEEPAN by renown French director Jacques Audiard. While Audiard was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2009, he took away his first Palm d'Or this year with DHEEPAN.

The film begins with a fierce Tamil warrior named 'Dheepan' (played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan) watching a pile of burning bodies, the casualties of a tribal massacre during the Sri Lankan Civil War. The fighting has ended but his tribe has lost and his only hope for survival is political asylum in France. Dheepan travels with 25 year-old Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and 9-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby); the three of them have lost their own families in the war and must pretend to be a family for survival. With fake passports and each other, they travel by boat to France for a new and better life.

Dheepan manages to get a job as a caretaker in a housing project in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, a northeastern suburb of Paris. In the midst of living the fantasy of being a family with Yalini and Illayaal, Dheepan finds himself craving it to become a reality. Tormented by nightmares of the massacres and war of his past, he seeks only peace and serenity for his future. Ironically, he is now living in the middle of a different war, this one in France where gangs fight and kill each other over territory and positions of power.

Partly inspired by Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the film is a rough portrayal of Paris suburbs and the war that is not only going on everywhere else but right in the backyards of the 'First World'. While so many millions of refugees flee their war-torn countries every year in search of a better life, if they are lucky to make it alive to their new chosen land, many find that life is not much easier in the new world. And while we might escape the places of our past, we carry that history with us wherever we go as the crosses we bear. While the film is a dark portrayal of violence and massacre, we are reminded that hope is always around the corner, that love and redemption are always within reach.

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré

Stars: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby

View clip here:

Written by Vanessa McMahon