When Dheepan won the much-coveted Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, it was something of a left-field choice from the jury. But there can be no denying the power of this tale of vigilante rage from French director Jacques Audiard, whose previous works include the much-heralded The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet and Rust and Bone.

A brief prologue in Sri Lanka sets the story as three strangers – a man, woman and child – are thrown together and escape the carnage of the civil war. Arriving in France, this trio cling to each other, desperate to make new lives in a world every bit as hostile as the one they left behind; yet this is no ordinary immigrant tale of hardships and struggle.

Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), the proxy patriarch and a former Tamil Tiger fighter, gets a job as caretaker of the bleak housing estate where they live; his “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) also takes on cooking and cleaning for an ailing resident. With their “child” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) at school, Audiard carefully draws us into this surrogate family who seek normality, even intimacy, together.