cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Like Dheepan, it turns migration into immediate, lived-in suspense: people without secure status improvise a life in a hostile city, while a tightly controlled thriller plot never loses sight of their vulnerability.
02
Why this pick
Its pressured housing-estate setting, alert handheld realism and escalating street-level tension strongly echo Dheepan’s portrait of domestic life hemmed in by violence and fractured authority.
03
Why this pick
This shares Dheepan’s intimate focus on an improvised family life under immigration precarity, balancing social realism with a quietly mounting sense that one setback can undo everything.
04
Why this pick
A darker, more abrasive companion: an undocumented newcomer’s pursuit of stability becomes a tense study of isolation, humiliation and the volatile survival instincts beneath urban assimilation.
05
Why this pick
It shares the emotional dislocation of people forced to inhabit borrowed identities and uncertain family bonds, rendered with restrained suspense and a contemporary cityscape that feels permanently unsettled.
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01 / THE STORY
Sivadhasan is a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam soldier during the last days of the Sri Lankan Civil War. After the armed conflict resolves, his side loses and he is forced to move to a refugee camp. There he decides to move to France to take a fresh chance at life. However, in order to secure political asylum, he requires a convincing cover story. He is given the passport of a dead man, Dheepan, and pairs with people he barely knows posing as his family. Along with his supposed wife, Yalini and his supposed 9-year-old daughter, Illayaal, they get on a ship bound for Paris. Upon arrival, he lands a job as a resident caretaker and starts building a new life in a housing project named Le Pré . He winds up as a caretaker of a rough housing project controlled by drug dealers (filmed on location in the peaceful project of La Coudraie, in the suburban city of Poissy). The new home turns out to be another conflict zone for him. Shootouts between rival drug gangs terrify Yalini and Illayaal as they try to fit into their roles as mother and daughter. Yalini is pressured to accept a job as a nurse-maid to the father of the local drug lord. Sivadhasan attends to his duties in spite of the chaos that surrounds him but is drawn into the fight. Caught in the crossfire of a climactic gunfight, Sivadhasan's latent battle-readiness resurfaces and he single-handedly destroys an entire gang with just a handgun, a machete and a screwdriver. He rescues Yalini from her boss's blood-soaked apartment. Eventually they all manage to immigrate to England where they find real peace.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Brahim
La directrice de l'école
Dheepan
