Hong Kong was refuge for star of Cannes Palme d'Or winner Dheepan
Jesuthasan Anthonythasan fled to city after three years as a child soldier in his native Sri Lanka, and spent six months in Chungking Mansions before moving on to Thailand
The lead actor in this year's Cannes festival-winning film about refugees has told of how he took refuge in Hong Kong as a teenager after years fighting in Sri Lanka's civil war.
"The Chungking Mansions - that's where I stayed, for six months," Jesuthasan Antonythasan told the South China Morning Post, hours before the film in which he stars, Dheepan, was named the surprise winner of the French festival's top honour, the Palme d'Or.
Anthonythasan arrived in the city in 1988 as a 19-year-old after three years fighting in the ranks of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, who sought an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority. The actor added: "I went to Hong Kong because that was the only place I don't need a visa [to go to]."
Antonythasan eventually left for Thailand, where he lived for four years before relocating to Paris in 1993. As with his decision to leave Sri Lanka for Hong Kong five years earlier, his choice of France was more practical than personal - rather than a fake British or Canadian passport, he said, he could only locate a French one.
The actor's own experiences echo those of the titular character he plays in Dheepan, which revolves around three Sri Lankan refugees settling into a rough Parisian suburb, and was directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard. The part was "50 per cent autobiographical", he said. In the film, he plays a former guerilla commander who takes up counterfeit papers and moves to France as part of a bogus family comprising two other refugees.