Event
FILM
Dheepan
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the new film from acclaimed director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) is a gripping, human tale of survival. On the losing side of a civil war in Sri Lanka, a Tamil soldier (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) poses as the husband and father of two other refugees in order to escape their ravaged homeland. Arriving in France, the makeshift “family” sets about establishing a new life—only to find themselves once again embroiled in violence on the mean streets of Paris. A heartrending saga of three strangers united by circumstance and struggle, Dheepan is both a tour-de-force thriller and a powerful depiction of the immigrant experience.
"Scene by scene, there's a leanness and economy to Audiard's filmmaking that gradually shifts, via dreamlike ellipses and temporal blurs, into a poetically heightened register."
"Mr. Jesuthasan, watchful and diffident behind a scruffy beard and a drooping lock of hair, has the taciturn charisma of a Hollywood gunslinger. And the movie in which he finds himself is, in some ways, a western."
"Audiard has always had the heart of a genre filmmaker tempered with the eyes of a behavioralist. He gets in close to his characters - focusing on their faces, their hands, their feet - so that we feel every blow and quiver, every scream and whisper."
