On the losing side of a civil war in Sri Lanka, a Tamil soldier poses as the husband and father of two other refugees in order to escape their ravaged homeland. Arriving in France, the makeshift “family” sets about establishing a new life-only to find themselves once again embroiled in violence on the mean streets of Paris. Dheepan is a heartrending saga of three strangers united by circumstance and struggle and also a powerful depiction of the immigrant experience.
Cert 15 – France 2015
Director: Jacques Audiard – Running time: 100 minutes – Language: English subtitles
Cast: Jesuthasan Antonyhasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan
In the Belier family, everyone is deaf, except dutiful sixteen-year-old Paula who acts as an indispensable interpreter for her parents and younger brother, especially in the running of the family dairy farm. While her father has decided to run for mayor, spurred on by her vivacious but over-involved mother, Paula’s attention is elsewhere. After impulsively joining the school choir, her music teacher discovers her natural talent for singing and encourages her to travel to Paris to develop her singing voice. This moving and humorous family drama, featuring Louane Emera as Paula (first discovered in the French edition of The Voice), was a word-of-mouth phenomenon across Europe, becoming France’s most popular film of 2015.
Adapted from the bestselling book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Adam McKay’s film is a comedic take on the international banking collapse of 2008. Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling are a group of unorthodox investment bankers who recognise that the boom years of finance are built on the shakiest of foundations and seek to make their fortunes from the crash that no one else appears to foresee. It’s funny because it’s true, and it’s tragic and frightening for the same reason.
Suffragette is an historical drama about the women who were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality in early-20th-century Britain. The story centres around Maud (played by Carey Mulligan), a working wife and mother whose life is forever changed when she is secretly recruited to join the U.K.’s growing suffragette movement.
Set on a remote South Pacific island, covered by rain forest and dominated by an active volcano, this is a heartfelt story of a forbidden love affair, a sister’s loyalty and the struggle between traditional culture and the new ways. The film’s familiar plot, a Romeo and Juliet affair with the star-crossed lovers of rival tribes, is based on a true story and is beautifully enacted by people of the Yakel tribe of Vanuatu.
Gummi and Kiddi are estranged brothers raising their prized ancestral sheep stock in an isolated Icelandic valley. When the authorities want to cull their flocks to halt the spread of a lethal disease, the brothers are forced to come together to save the special breed passed down for generations – and their own way of life – from extinction. Rams was winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.