Autobiographically, yours
Art imitates life, and French-Tamil director and actor Lawrence Valin is making a strong case for the saying with his debut film Little Jaffna, a pulsating new addition to the growing genre of South Asian diaspora cinema. It revolves around a French-Tamil cop Michael Beaulieu (played by Valin himself), who is assigned to infiltrate a powerful gang of Tamil Eelam supporters in Paris that is illegally channelling money to the separatists in Sri Lanka.
Quite like the character he plays on screen, Valin was born and raised in France by his Tamil immigrant parents who had to flee Sri Lanka at the height of insurgency. “Many filmmakers go back to the countries of their origin to make films. But I wanted to tell my story which is set here in France. How I grew up, how I struggled as a Tamil and a French boy, how I spoke Tamil at home but had to put my Tamil-ness aside in the world outside,” he says.
In much the same way, Valin also had to let go of his dream of becoming an actor to pursue a safer career in management. However, it was while doing a course in theatre and public speaking for his management programme that his love for acting got rekindled, and he decided to quit at 21 to study for five years at the La Résidence de La Fémis—one of the best film schools in France.
His hyphenated identity meant limited opportunities after graduation. “I got to play only Indian guys,” he says, adding, “I’d always be seen as a Frenchman in India, while here in France I was told that I’m an Indian.”
Valin was whisper close to getting his big break as the lead in Jacques Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’Or winner Dheepan, but it later became that of an older man. It’s at that point that he started thinking about becoming a director—creating characters and stories for himself and telling them his own way.
One of his shorts, The Loyal Man, premiered at the prestigious Clermont-Ferrand film festival. Little Jaffna is also having a dream run in the festival circuit. After successful screenings at Venice, Toronto and Zurich, it played recently in the South Asian Competition section at the Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI).
Little Jaffna presents a never-seen-before side of Paris on screen, the Tamil ghettos in which posters of the God-like superstar Vijay loom large; where watching his film is an event; and cricket, cinema, colours and festivals—Christmas as well as Ganesh Chaturthi—energise the streets.
“Normally in a gangster film, everything is dark, but I have colour in every section. In France, Tamil people are living in the shadows. I decided to put a light on them,” says Valin. He hopes many more Tamil representations in French cinema will follow. “For me it’s a way of opening the door to other ways of looking at Tamil people,” he says.
Little Jaffna boasts of a memorable ensemble performance led by two Indian icons, Raadhika Sarathkumar and Vela Ramamoorthy, who play the key roles of Michael’s grandmother and former Tamil Tiger-turned-head of the gang respectively. But the rest of the cast comprises largely young non-professional first-time French-Tamil actors.
“I am the only professional French actor,” says Valin. He needed to get experienced actors from India to muster the community’s support. “In the French-Tamil community, acting is like a mere hobby. But when Raadhika ma’am came, things became serious. People started to regard Little Jaffna as a professional film,” he says.
A fan of gangster drama, Valin grew up watching Scorsese, Tarantino and Bong Joon-ho films. Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has been another favourite. “GOW played at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. There is a Western vision and style, but it’s an Indian story with Indian actors. I’m trying to do something similar. I’m talking about our people, but it’s a French film,” says Valin.
Gangster drama is also a genre that ties in well with what he wanted to achieve cinematically. “Within gangster films you can tell political stuff, and at the same time you can hold people’s interest. It’s the way that I love to do cinema. The more people you draw in, the more the stories get known to the world,” he says. On watching the film, many French people told him that they had no idea about the war in Sri Lanka. The idea was also to make the young French-Tamil diaspora get acquainted with a significant slice of their own history.
But above everything else, for Valin the film is not about politics so much as humanity. Says he: “It’s not about being pro Tiger or anti-government. It’s about the pain of people.”
“I got to play only Indian guys. I’d always be seen as a Frenchman in India, while here in France I was told that I’m an Indian”