Little Jaffna: Living between worlds
In Little Jaffna (2024), writer-director-actor Lawrence Valin delivers more than a debut feature — he crafts a defiant act of representation. Set in the immigrant heart of Paris’s La Chapelle district, the film threads personal trauma, diasporic displacement, and systemic marginalization into the structure of a crime thriller. But beneath its gangster genre skin beats the pulse of a political film — one that interrogates what it means to live between worlds that refuse to claim you fully.
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Little Jaffna was the opening film at the recently concluded 3rd i’s 23rd Annual San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. The crime thriller premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2024 and was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Zurich Film Festival.
The film follows Michael (Valin), a French police officer of Tamil origin, ordered to infiltrate a Tamil gang accused of funding Sri Lankan militants. What begins as a procedural mission becomes an existential descent into identity and loyalty — a metaphor for every child of migration asked to police their own heritage in order to belong.
Tamil-French narrative bends genres
Valin’s choice to center Tamil-French identity within the language of the thriller is a radical cinematic gesture. It subverts the Euro-centric crime genre, redirecting its lens toward the racialized spaces France prefers to ignore. The neon glow of Paris is replaced with dimly lit curry shops, cramped apartments, and Tamil grocery aisles — not as exotic backdrops but as sites of resistance and community.
The bilingual script (Tamil and French) resists assimilation. By refusing to translate everything, Valin makes a political statement: the viewer must lean in, the characters don’t reach out. This choice reverses decades of colonial cinematic hierarchy, where non-white cultures were required to explain themselves to white audiences.
Colonial shadows, modern policing
Little Jaffna situates its moral conflict in the echo chamber of post-colonial policing. Michael’s double role — both officer of the French Republic and son of a colonized diaspora — captures the psychological violence of assimilation. Every undercover scene is also an allegory of systemic surveillance: the state’s gaze intruding into the immigrant home.
In one standout moment, Michael watches a Tamil news broadcast of the Sri Lankan war while his French colleagues joke about “foreign conflicts.” The juxtaposition isn’t subtle — it’s deliberate. Valin insists that the empire never ended; it just learned to disguise itself in multicultural rhetoric.
An intersectional experience
The women in Little Jaffna are not simply emotional anchors; they are carriers of generational memory. Radhika Sarathkumar’s portrayal of Michael’s grandmother — a survivor who fled war — embodies the matrilineal burden of exile. Her quiet resilience contrasts with the performative masculinity of both the police and the gang, suggesting that true endurance in diaspora spaces has always been feminine, communal, and care-oriented.
Meanwhile, Puviraj Raveendran’s character Puvi, a charismatic gang member, becomes a critique of how marginalized men are criminalized for seeking agency denied by society. The film never excuses violence — but it contextualizes it, forcing audiences to see the socio-economic roots of rebellion.
Unfiltered aesthetics
Cinematographer Maxence Lemonnier’s palette is dense and unglamorous — warm earth tones, fluorescent blues, smoke from kitchen vents — signaling that beauty in Little Jaffna arises from visibility, not polish. The community’s sights and sounds are not filtered for palatability; they demand recognition. The sound design, mixing temple chants with sirens and news static, reflects the collision of cultures.
For audiences from marginalized backgrounds, Little Jaffna isn’t merely representation — it’s reclamation. For everyone else, it’s a chance to confront how systems of race, migration and memory intertwine even in so-called “post-colonial” Europe.
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