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| Photograph:Pierre Suu |
An independent film based on Tamil refugees starting a new life in France after fleeing Sri Lanka won the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or.
‘Dheepan,’ directed by France’s most acclaimed film directors, Jacques Audiard, told the story of a former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighter, a Tamil woman and nine year old girl, who assumed the identities of a dead family to escape an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Sri Lanka during the armed phase of the ethnic conflict.
The lead actor, novelist Anthonythasan Jesuthasan, was an actual fighter for the LTTE when he was 16, and sought asylum in France in 1993.
Speaking at an interview during the Cannes film festival on Friday, Mr Jesuthasan when asked if the situation in Sri Lanka had improved said
“Officially in 2009 the war had come to an end. However even today there are still armed attacks against minorities in Sir Lanka. Even today, we don’t know how many prisoners of war were captured by the government, we have no real information.”
Director Jacques Audiard, describing his thinking behind the film, said,
“The intention was not to produce a documentary on the civil war in Sri Lanka or house estates. That violence is the backdrop. We wanted the characters to embody this whole story.”
When asked if the film was intended to be a political statement that portrayed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as freedom fighters when they have been labelled as a terrorist organisation by the European Union, Mr Audiard, said,
"I’m a coward in that respect. I didn’t want to make a political statement. However when I learnt about this horrible war, and that people are still suffering, I was deeply upset. Especially when I saw the pictures of the conflict. I can’t assess the conflict. I provide very little information about the background of the conflict because I think other people can do this better than I. It was very interesting to bring this conflict into a fiction for this film”
See full interview below:
One of the film's story writers, Noe Debre, commenting on why they chose to do a story on a former Tamil cadre, said,
“The Tamil refugees come from a very violent background, however they don’t depict violence or have any images of violence as we do. These people have had to run away from a tragedy.”