Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

quinimdb "Dheepan" is an incredibly gripping character study of a man who was a Tamil soldier in Sri Lanka, who soon meets with another female refugee and a young child with no parents in order to pose as a family so that they can escape to France. It is clear that the members of the fake family aren't exactly interested in each other. They each simply left to survive, especially Yalini, who even left her two brothers in order to save herself (which doesn't mean she didn't care about them). We soon learn that Dheepan lost his entire family and all of his friends, which is what caused him to move away. He is mostly quiet and does what he can to get by and fit in. Illayal, the young girl, has no parents, so she accepts these parents the best that she can.They are not just adapting to their environment, but also adapting to each other. All of these characters have trouble connecting to others towards the beginning. Illayal is put in a special needs class in order to learn French and she is excluded by her classmates. When she is thrown out of school for fighting with a girl that excluded her, Yalini scolds her and yells at her. Illayal becomes frustrated since Yalini made her feel even more excluded, and she begins to show it by mocking her. Yalini freaks out and hits her, and later they have a conversation in which Illayal requests that she tries to treat her well. Dheepan gets a job and gets one for Yalini, but they quickly realize that the apartment buildings they live at are populated by a French gang. Yalini becomes fascinated with the gang leader, who frequently comes into the room she works in. While she feels isolated by all others, he is one that connects with her.Dheepan slowly begins to care more about Yalini and Illayal, but as his love for them grows, a commander of the army he was in while in the Sri Lankan civil war finds him and commands him to get guns for him. Dheepan refuses, and says the war is over for him, but he is then physically beat. A gang war erupts while Yalini and Illayal are coming home from her school, and Yalini decides to ditch. She does seem to care about Illayal and Dheepan, but she convinces herself that she doesn't, and reminds herself that the family is fake in order to leave to her sister in England, which seemed to be her original plan anyway. She understandably doesn't want to get caught in exactly what she just got out of. Dheepan finds her at the train station and physically forces her back to their home. When she is frisked by gang members, he throws the gang member on the ground. Dheepan begins to believe in the fantasy that this is his family so he doesn't have to accept the reality that his family is dead. He declares his own war against the gang by telling them that they can't fire past a certain line. He essentially assumes the role of a soldier that he did in Sri Lanka, and he does it to protect his new family. He wanted so badly for Yalini to care for him back, he begins using force to protect his "family" and force against Yalini in order to maintain it. Eventually, he realizes what he has done and how far he has come, and he simply leaves train tickets and money for Yalini to leave. This is what makes Yalini realize that Dheepan is a good man that has been altered by the war. His PTSD came back and his war mentality kicked in, which eventually builds to the intense finale, in which Dheepan mows through gang members in a trance like state, almost forgetting where he is and why by the end of it.This final, climactic scene is incredibly visceral and flawlessly directed. It is insane yet remains realistic and somewhat horrifying. When Dheepan is shot in the face, the cinematography mirrors his point of view: getting blurry and slow and then suddenly coming back to his determined and war like state. The camera tracks his feet as he pulls out a machete and walks past the white line, immediately bringing us into the realization of what is happening. The very end, I believe, is Dheepan's fantasy of having a normal, loving family. The focus on the shot of Yalini's hand touching the back of his head leads me to believe that this was a vision he had after his mass killing and his saving of Yalini."Dheepan" slowly grips the viewer tighter and tighter, until one is completely engrossed by the film. The film is filled with complex and deeply troubled characters who simply can't escape their past, no matter how hard they try. The morality of the characters begins to become blurred, and no one is really the good guy in this film. Every actor in the film is fantastic, and the film is subtle in its writing. The characters slowly unravel themselves throughout the film and as this happens each moment with them is made more and more involving and unpredictable. The cinematography is fantastic and the way the film is shot gives it an air of realism while also adding nice stylistic touches to certain shots and certain scenes in the film. Certain subtleties such as Dheepan talking with people passing by as the camera pans up to show him fitting in, as well as the young girl mentioning going to a birthday party, and Dheepan sitting around with his co-workers, they all add up to give us a sense of the characters adapting to their environment and a passage of time.

gizmomogwai It's interesting that as France and other countries around the Western world become more diverse, we're seeing more films like this. Westerners are telling the stories of their own countries as well as other, distant and more foreign ones, told through the eyes of immigrants, refugees or their descendants. Many wouldn't know much about the Sri Lankan Civil War, or that they had a civil war, with one French character in the film not even knowing where Sri Lanka is. But now, the French have produced a Palme d' Or-winning film drawing on it.Dheepan is told from the perspective of the titular character, a Tamil warrior who comes to France as a caretaker and lives with people he knew there. They aren't actually a family, though they look like one. There's some trouble adjusting- he struggles with customs officials, to whom he tries to pass himself off as a peace activist, before admitting his real family died in the war. His adoptive daughter can't speak the language well at school, and reveals her old school was destroyed. She gets into a playground brawl. These struggles with adapting are probably more interesting than where the story goes, with the sudden action movie climax. Though much of the movie before then can be slow, there is something to like about it. Still, one comes away from Dheepan without feeling much of the wow factor. Not bad, though a weaker Palme d'Or.

Howard Schumann The 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009), a conflict between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the Hindu Tamil minority in which 200,000 people were killed, including tens of thousands of Tamil civilians forms the backdrop for French director Jacques Audiard's searing refugee drama Dheepan. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, it is the story of three Tamil immigrants from Sri Lanka newly settled in Paris, their adjustment to an often unwelcoming environment, and the bond they form based on mutual need and acceptance of the others pain.Like Audiard's previous film, Rust and Bone, it is raw and visceral, yet also a film of lyricism and sensitivity. Though the film seems to draw a parallel between the war in Sri Lanka and social unrest in France, it is a fictional film and, according to Audiard, is not intended to mirror the actual conditions of refugees in France which he believes has been mostly welcoming. Written by Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré and photographed by Eponine Momenceau, the film opens in Sri Lanka as the Tamil fighter Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a novelist and a former Tamil Tiger himself), whose cause faces defeat, lays palm leaves across the corpses on a funeral pyre before burning his own military fatigues.The scene shifts to Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), a young woman attempting to ensure her passage out of the country by finding a young girl to pose as her daughter, She finds Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), a girl who can pass for nine, and takes her to where Dheepan (an assumed name) is being given the passports of three dead people. Assuming new identities, the three pretend to be a family escaping persecution in Sri Lanka and are relocated to France where they are employed as caretakers of a housing project in the Paris suburbs. It is a locale reminiscent of the projects in Mathieu Kassovitz', La Haine, where drug dealing and urban decay are pervasive.Their guide Youssouf (Marc Zinga) gives them a tour but the instructions, in a language they do not understand, do not register. Youssouf skirts around the problem of the drug dealers who congregate in another block across the courtyard, only telling him to wait until they leave before beginning to clean. As Illayal goes to school to learn French and Yalini is assigned to cook and clean for an elderly man whose nephew Brahim (Vincent Rottiers) is one of the local gang leaders, the film traces the gradual assimilation of the family, their overriding desire for connection, not only to the language and customs, but to each other. Though the film is restrained with moments of tenderness and humor as well as anger and frustration, underneath there is a growing tension.Violence erupts when Dheepan, who suffers from PTSD, draws a white line across the courtyard that they are not to cross and it has a jarring effect though, to me, not out of sync with the film's setup and exploration of its characters. Though Audiard claims that Dheepan is not intended to be political, given the real-life nature of the circumstances, it cannot help but be just that. He said that he wanted "to give the faceless a name, a face, a shape," a story of their own and he has succeeded. In making a human document, he reminds us of the connection we have with people around the world whose voices we cannot hear, whose faces we cannot see, and whose hands we may never touch.

paultreloar75 This movie wasn't what I expected at all, to be honest. Whereas I was expecting gritty and tense, the plot is actually very much about the three people who we learn to care so much about. A family uprooted to a foreign land where the only one who can help make sense of it is the child whose dealing with oh so much more.As a totem for some of the current travails facing the European Union project (tm) it's quite a pertinent and valuable piece that shows how much you need some luck and determination and application to make any progress in life. It makes you care for these simple people, who have similar hopes and dreams and worries and discontents as the rest of us.A clever use of juxtapositions underpins much of what we see, and whilst some have questioned the explosive climax, I think it ends things very well, although the sugar-coated conclusion did see me mark it down one point. What a movie though, what a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining approach to the modern world. Worth a watch.