Little Jaffna review – undercover cop thriller goes deep into French-Tamil gangland
Lawrence Valin directs and stars in this Paris-set drama, where a young man caught between cultures infiltrates criminals shaped by Sri Lanka’s civil war
Here is a Paris-set story that unfolds during the Sri Lankan civil war and revolves around Tamil immigrants supportive of the insurgent Tamil Tigers, but politics is not much more to the fore than good old-fashioned gangster machinations. Writer, director and star Lawrence Valin is himself from the French-Tamil community and he immerses the film within that hybrid culture beautifully, drawing out the internal conflicts and loyalties that a man like the one he plays here, Michael, might feel in the circumstances.
Like many of the people he lives among, Michael is an orphan who came to France after both his parents met violent ends in the war in Sri Lanka. Brought up by his grandmother (Radhika Sarathkumar), who is, like much of the community, a staunch Catholic, Michael is torn between a longing for acceptance in the immigrant subculture and the local white French people among whom he’s grown up. Indeed, everyone calls him “whitey”, partly because he acts like a Frenchman, what with his insistence on eating with a fork instead of hands, and partly because of the vitiligo that creates white patches on his skin.
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