Dheepan, a veteran Tamil Tiger, has to leave Sri Lanka with Yalini, a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee posing as his wife and a young girl posing as their daughter. After some heart-stopping interrogation, they manage to get past immigration and land in Paris. But this is not the city of love the world knows. In its suburbs, they are housed in refugee quarters and get only the most menial jobs, and here they face daily fire from local drug gangs engaged in gun battle. Dheepan and Yalini deal not only with the memories of the horror they have left behind, but also the frightening reality of survival in their land of asylum.
Meanwhile, the teenage girl living with them has to deal with the loss of her parents and also face the bitter reality of how difficult parental love is to come by.
With a compelling performance by Antonythasan Jesuthasan as Dheepan and Kalieaswari Srinivasan as his wife Yalini, the film Dheepan, winner of this year’s Palme d’Ór, directed by French director, Jacques Audiard, takes the audience to the heart of darkness that symbolises the lives of asylum seekers. Ironically, it is Dheepan’s past that finally helps him triumph over his present and save his “family.”
Even as the world’s television screens and newspapers are full of stories of the thousands of refugees trying to get across oceans and borders from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey into Europe, the screens at the 59th British Film Institute London Film Festival in London’s West End and South Bank came alive with powerful narratives on celluloid of migration, displacement, victimhood, loss, and hope.
Desierto , a co-production between Mexico and France screened in the official competition, told the story of a group of refugees trying to escape from Mexico on foot across deserts and mountains and into the U.S. But the route is riddled with danger. They are chased by a trigger-happy racist and his ferocious Alsatian. The unarmed immigrants fall prey to his bullets and his dog, finally leaving just two refugees, a young man waiting to be reunited with his son who is already in the U.S. and a young girl who wants to go there in search of a new life. The film directed by Jonas Cuaron gets to the heart of the plight of the thousands who are trying to cross borders in different parts of the world in search of a better life and the deadly risks they undertake.
In Babai — The Father, Kosovo-born director Visar Morina tells the moving story of ten-year-old Nori and his father, Gesim, who are trying to flee to Germany from Kosovo. The little boy is extremely insecure because his mother abandoned the family and clings to his father. So, when his father leaves for Germany without him to avoid putting him through the dangers of illegal immigration, Nori does not hesitate to commit anti-social acts and embark on a dangerous mission to be reunited with his father. The moving film about victimhood, told through the eyes of a child, gets under your skin and chillingly reminds you of the vulnerability of migrants.
The London Film Festival, held from October 7 to 18, showcased around 240 films, which included both fiction and non-fiction under the themes Love, Thrill, Dare, Cult, Laugh, Debate, Journey, Experimenta, Treasures, and others.
Indian entries like Aligarh premiered at LFF and wowed audiences. Veteran actor Manoj Bajpayee plays the lead role of Professor Siras, a Marathi teacher at Aligarh University. The professor is hounded by the university when local stringers trap him with a camera and find him in a gay relationship with a rickshaw puller. The professor is removed from his post. Bajpayee delivers a nuanced performance and is a good foil to the young enthusiastic journalist, Deepu, played by Rajkummar Rao of Queen fame. Deepu tries to probe the circumstances of how Prof. Siras’s privacy was violated, as opposed to the hounding he faced for being gay. Armed with a moving screenplay by young writer, Apurva Asrani, and directed by Hansal Mehta, Aligarh is a bold and sensitive film that should raise critical questions in a country like India that still criminalises homosexuality. “We were lucky to have got Eros International to distribute the film and hope that it will reach different audiences in India,” Mehta told this journalist in London.
In Beeba Boys , director Deepa Mehta makes a huge departure from her own filming genres and chooses to make a gangster film set among Vancouver’s Sikh immigrants. Randeep Hooda and Gulshan Grover are the protagonists, caught in a bitter turf war in their adopted country. Other Indian films shown at the LFF were Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s The Classmate , Bhaskar Hazarika’s Assamese film Kothanodi , Partha Sen Gupta’s Marathi film Arunoday ( Sunrise ).
The best short film award went to Indian entry An Old Dog’s Diary, directed by Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel. The film is a portrait of Francis Souza, a leading Indian artist of the 20th century. Daisy Jacob, jury president, said: “ An Old Dog’s Diary is as poetic and soulful as its subject. It offers a fresh and original way of documenting the life of an artist. It looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, but, more than that, it tells us about the beauty of the human spirit.”
The festival opened with the premiere of British production Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron and starring Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter, Carey Mulligan, and Ben Whishaw. Streep, who plays the role of the legendary leader of the Suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, said in a press briefing after the film, that she welcomed women’s histories that had been kept from the public so far, being now told to wider audiences through books and films. With the centenary of women getting the right to vote in the U.K. fast approaching, there could be no better time to remember the Suffragettes. In fact, the festival had a special focus on women film-makers and women-oriented themes.
The LFF closed with Steve Jobs directed by Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame. The film is about the man who transformed technology, even as his personal life threatened to overtake him. Steve Jobs is played by Michael Fassbender and his wife by Kate Winslet.
Other interesting films included Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran , Jay Roach’s Trumbo , Truth starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith, Lobster starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz , Idol directed by two-time Oscar-nominated Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad, and the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Son of Saul, directed by Laszio Nemes.
Festival Director Clare Stewart said: “I’m very proud of what we achieved with the 59th edition of the Festival. We had terrific film-makers in attendance and generated a significant profile for films in selection which have moved, challenged and inspired audiences. Importantly, the festival has been rich and memorable in amplifying the focus on gender equality and diversity in the film industry . ”
Nupur Basu is an independent journalist, documentary film-maker and media educator.
