After winning the prestigious Palme d’Or award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, ‘Dheepan’, directed and co-written by acclaimed French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, is at last due for a UK release. Said to be loosely inspired by Persian Letters, a literary piece by political philosopher Montesquieu, the film tackles the very topical subject of immigration. Sivadhasan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) is a Tamil Tiger freedom fighter in the Sri-Lankan Civil War who is sent to a refugee camp and given the identity of a dead man named Dheepan. Posing as a family, he and his supposed wife Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and nine-year-old girl Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) flee to France in search of a better life. Dheepan lands a caretaking job when they settle in a squalid suburb north of Paris, but soon faces danger in a very different kind of warzone.

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