Dheepan

Jacques Audiard's Dheepan won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2015, Audiard's second major Cannes prize after A Prophet's Grand Prix six years earlier. The win was widely treated as a surprise; the predicted Palme had been Todd Haynes's Carol or László Nemes's Son of Saul. The film consolidated Audiard's continuing exploration of male identity under conditions of forced reinvention that had shaped his earlier work.

A former Tamil Tiger fighter named Sivadhasan (the non-professional first-time actor Jesuthasan Antonythasan, himself a former Tamil Tiger), a young woman named Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and a small girl named Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) (the three of them strangers) pose as a family in a Sri Lankan refugee camp in order to claim asylum in France together. The forged identities they take are those of the dead Dheepan, his wife and his daughter. The film follows the trio as they are placed in a Paris housing estate caretaker job and slowly construct an actual family life in the geography of the role they are performing.

The film operates simultaneously as immigration drama, character study of a man unable to leave his earlier soldier-life behind, and meditation on what counts as belonging. Antonythasan's debut performance (built largely on physical stillness and silence) is one of the most distinctive non-professional debuts in 21st-century French cinema. Éponine Momenceau's photography of the Paris suburbs and the brief Sri Lankan-coastal coda produced a distinctive landscape register.