How the Sri Lankan civil war made its way into a French film about an undercover cop
Lawrence Valin’s ‘Little Jaffna’ examines the duality of being a French citizen with Sri Lankan Tamil heritage.
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In 2009, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam insurgency in Sri Lanka came to a brutal end, Lawrence Valin was 20 years old and far away from the land of his origin. The actor of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage was born and raised in France. Yet, when it came to making his first film, it was duality – of language, colour, culture, identity – that inspired Valin.
Little Jaffna explores its lead character’s divided loyalties through the prism of a crime thriller. Valin’s film. which is in both French and Tamil, is set in 2008 in the titular neighborhood in Paris inhabited by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.
Valin plays Michael Beaulieu, a Tamil-origin police officer who infiltrates a criminal gang called Killiz that provides funds to the LTTE. Michael is torn between professional duty and identification with outliers who have created a home away from home for themselves. Michael wonders whether the gang’s trafficking of war-scarred refugees is a righteous form of assistance to a community that cannot enter France through legal means.
Colourful, kinetic and thoughtful, and with a pulsating score, Little Jaffna was shown at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in October. The movie will be released commercially in France and the United Kingdom over...
