Dheepan
| Dheepan | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Jacques Audiard |
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| Screenplay by |
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| Starring | Antonythasan Jesuthasan |
| Music by | Nicolas Jaar |
| Cinematography | Eponine Momenceau |
| Edited by | Juliette Welfling |
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Production
companies |
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| Distributed by | UGC Distribution |
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Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country | France |
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| Budget | €8 million |
| Box office | $4.9 million |
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. 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's title character, played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan, was a former Tamil Tiger child soldier. 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.
Audiard started making the movie with the intent to make a variation of Sam Peckinpah's 1971 thriller Straw Dogs. But he wanted to set it in a community that no one in France knew much about. He and his writing partner, Thomas Bidegain, decided on the Tamils. During filming, Mr. Jesuthasan sometimes made corrections for accuracy.
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 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.
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Wikipedia