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Eelam Tamils have a growing connection with Indian Tamils through shared language, cultural heritage, history, and cosmology, despite not having a shared geography or homeland. This paper contributes to understanding this peculiar connection by focusing on the cultural impacts of Indian Tamil films on Eelam Tamil refugees resettled in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the existing scholarship on pan-Tamil identity, memory, and film, the paper asks: how did consuming Tamil films affect Eelam Tamils' cultural identities in their refugee resettlement? Transcultural memory is used as a framework to examine this interaction and the multi-focal identities and orientations among Eelam Tamils towards pan-Tamilness. Tamil refugees used film in a novel way to recall difficult memories of the pressures felt by a young war generation to sustain their cultural heritage while adjusting to the cultural norms of Australia. Consuming films become formative to reconstructing their cultural identities and enables the possibilities for exploring the cultural linkages and disconnections that constitute the heterogeneity of pan-Tamil subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Indian film within Australia at the level of production, distribution and exhibition is one of the most important transformations in the Australian cinema landscape over the past decade. Despite Australian efforts to attract runaway Hollywood production, Indian films currently constitute the major international production component in Australia. These films represent notable departures from received notions of Australian film production: they foreground urban cosmopolitanism in Australia rather than rural landscape-based cinema, and they are responsive to state government policies rather than federal ones. The exhibition and distribution of Indian films has also become a major component in any description of Australian national cinema that incorporates the circulation and consumption of films. Indian films currently represent 10 per cent of the films released commercially in Australia. This article tracks the performance of Indian films at the Australian box office and argues that their presence and positioning in Australian cinema challenges traditional notions of the limits of diasporic cinema. Despite this increased prominence, Indian films remain a comparatively small part of Australian cinema consumption, and this article ends by trying to explain the factors that will need to be overcome for a continued expansion of this type of film consumption within Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]