WATCH: There’s More Than Meets the Eye in the Trailer for This Year’s Palme d’Or Winner “Dheepan”

Led by Joel and Ethan Coen, the Cannes jury selected Jacques Audiard’s refugee drama to win top honors.
Film + TV
WATCH: There’s More Than Meets the Eye in the Trailer for This Year’s Palme d’Or Winner “Dheepan”

Led by Joel and Ethan Coen, the Cannes jury selected Jacques Audiard’s refugee drama to win top honors.

Words: Nate Rogers

May 26, 2015

2015. Dheepan trailer screenshot

Over the weekend, the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival wrapped up (not without a certain amount of red carpet controversy), rounding out a worldly set of winners with Dheepan, this year’s Palme d’Or recipient.

Selected by a jury led by the Coen brothers, the French drama follows three Sri Lankan refugees attempting to make a new life for themselves in Paris by posing as a family. The film, co-written and directed by Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet), stars three amateur actors, most notably Jesuthasan Antonythasan, a writer and activist who himself was a former child soldier in Sri Lanka seeking asylum in France, much the same as the titular character of Dheepan. Seems just a tad bit different from Mad Max: Fury Road and Irrational Man, which were both screened out of competition at the festival.

Having beat out a formidable group of final nominees that included Todd Haynes’s Carol, Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, and Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, Audiard noted that, “To receive a prize from the Coen brothers is something pretty exceptional. I’m very touched.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfhMMDiRvzo

Dheepan is set for a future, unspecified US release with Sundance Selects.