"You’re going to become Michael Sebamalai again for us". A troubling return to his roots as part of an infiltration mission within the Tamil community in Paris, as organised by the Department of Homeland Security, is on the cards for the main character of Little Jaffna [+lee también:
entrevista: Lawrence Valin
ficha de la película], French director Lawrence Valin’s debut feature film which closed International Film Critics’ Week within the 81st Venice Film Festival. It’s a perilous immersion, taking us behind the scenes of the covert financing of the Tigers’ resistance in Sri Lanka, back when they were mired in a civil war against governmental forces, which lasted from 1983 to 2009, which claimed over 80,000 lives and which drove hundreds of thousands of Tamils into exile.

"You’re not in Paris now, you’re in Little Jaffna". At the heart of the Tamil district of La Chapelle, the Killiz gang - led by Aya (Vela Ramamoorthy), who appears to be an unobtrusive grocer but who is actually the Tigers’ Minister of Finance in France and a man feared by all - are draining a community (200 euros per family, 1,000 per shopkeeper) who are being drip-fed televised information on the bloody conflict underway back home.

Having arrived in France an orphan at the age of four and then being raised in Clermont-Ferrand by his grandmother (Indian star Radikaa Sarathkumar), straightforward police officer Michael Beaulieu (very well played by the director himself) is tasked with finding out when exactly the collected funds are due to be transported to Switzerland. Initially a server in a local bar, Michael wins the friendship of Puvi (Puviraj Raveendram), Aya’s right-hand man, and soon finds himself a member of the Killiz gang who are also in charge of illegal immigrant trafficking operations. But it’s first and foremost a kind of family that the infiltrator discovers, a culture ("eat with your hands, we’re Tamils"), and a faith in an armed resistance which they see as legitimate ("don’t talk about things you know nothing about"). It feels like a burning re-birth for Michael, which further complicates - psychologically speaking - a secret operation requiring ruse and sang-froid…

The film depicts this dual face-off embarked upon by our hero (both with his targets and with himself) by blending a classic chess-game-style police investigation, which is at constant risk of being rumbled, with an almost ethnological aquarium study of a community (with its celebrations, rites, and past and present worries linked to the war in Sri Lanka, etc.). The director further amplifies this hybridisation through a mise en scène approach which occasionally injects sequences typical of Tamil cinema (slow motions, Homeric fights between gangs, music, etc.) into the movie, combined with a little-theatre-style patina of shadows and dazzling colours. Add to this a significant number of non-professional actors and you have, in Little Jaffna, an unusual, refreshing and eminently pleasing cinematographic marriage within the landscape of young French cinema, which introduces some brand-new faces.

Little Jaffna was produced by Ex Nihilo and Mean Streets, in co-production with France 2 Cinéma. Charades are steering international sales.