It’s been nearly eight months since the Cannes Film Festival wrapped last May, but that time has seen many of our festival favorites find their way to cinemas around the world (including “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Carol,” and “Son Of Saul,” which all managed to keep up some buzz all the way to a handful of Oscar nods). But one film that was a major player all but fell off the map for a while: Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winner “Dheepan.” Today, though, a new trailer for the film has arrived.
Audiard is no stranger to the Cannes honors; his towering 2009 prison drama “A Prophet” won the Grand Prix jury prize (as well as an Oscar nomination). And that film, much like his latest, “Dheepan,” is not for the faint of heart. It follows Dheepan, who has just lost his wife and daughter, as he cobbles together a fake family so that he can get a passport and start a new life in France. When we caught Audiard’s film at Cannes we called it “absolutely terrific, and one of the strongest things he’s made so far, a film containing all Audiard’s strengths and few of his weaknesses.” Here’s the official synopsis:
To escape the civil war in Sri Lanka, a former soldier (played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan), a young woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and a little girl (Claudine Vinasithamby) pose as a family. They end up settling in a housing project outside Paris. They barely know one another, but try to build a life together. However, hurdles await them in the Paris suburbs, not least deciding what kind of relationship they want to have. This dilemma is intensified by the hard-knock struggle of holding down gruelling jobs on the dilapidated estate they call home, maintaining a stable domestic life, and looking after a ‘daughter’ (Claudine Vinasithamby) who belongs to neither of them. The trio’s predicament reaches boiling point when they trigger the unwelcome attention of the estate’s gang members, bringing their previously low-key existences to an abrupt end.
Check out the trailer below. “Dheepan” hits UK theaters April 8th (though no stateside release date has been set yet).
