Dheepan

Dheepan (2015), Jacques Audiard's drama, is available to watch online on iFILM. A former Tamil Tiger flees Sri Lanka and assembles a fake family on paper to make it across the border.

To claim asylum in France, he takes a dead man's identity and pairs it with a woman and a young girl he has never met. The three settle in a rough Paris housing project: he works as the building caretaker, she looks after a sick elderly man, the child starts school. Strangers playing husband, wife and daughter, they slowly grow into the roles for real. Then the gangs that run the estate close in, and the war Dheepan escaped catches up with him in a new shape.

Audiard took the Palme d'Or at Cannes for this one. Lead actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan was himself a Tamil fighter, and that lived experience bleeds into every scene. Made for anyone after a hard, unsentimental story about migration and starting over. Stream Dheepan (2015) online on iFILM.