Tourist Family

As the economic crisis in Sri Lanka deepens, Dharmadas takes his family and flees to India. They have no papers and no identity, and they settle into a neighbourhood in Chennai. Nobody must know they are Sri Lankan. Dharmadas, meanwhile, cannot keep quiet, involves himself in everything, and puts his nose into his neighbours' business. Abishan Jeevinth writes and directs, in his first film. M. Sasikumar plays Dharmadas and Simran plays his wife, with Mithun Jai Sankar and Kamalesh. The idea is the contradiction between the need to hide and the nature of the man. Someone who must stay invisible becomes the most visible person on the street, which produces both the comedy and the tension. The narrative refuses to stage refugee life as a pitiful tableau. The family's problem is not survival but acceptance, and the hardest scenes are not the police or the border but the neighbour's door. It premiered on 29 April 2025 and opened on 1 May. Against a budget of around 70 million rupees it took roughly 900 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable Indian films of 2025 and the seventh highest grossing Tamil film of the year. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil cinema, family comedy and stories about migration. Who it is not for: the emotional register climbs steeply at the end and the resolution comes more easily than it would.