the Dardenne brothers still moving with a film on refugees, prize of the 75th Cannes Film Festival

After two Palmes d’Or for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the special prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival for Tori and Lokita coming out Wednesday October 5th. The duo of Belgian directors still hits the mark sur the wandering in Belgium of two refugee minors from Benin. They always deal with a social subject which is their filmographic common thread, with moving roles and non-professional actors.

Freshly landed in Belgium from Benin, Lokita, who is approaching 18, has fallen in love with Tori, a ten-year-old boy whom she met on arrival and whom she considers to be her brother. To reimburse their smuggler, they participate in drug trafficking and she must submit sexually to the dealer. Separated from Tori by the trafficker she works with, Lokita will out of friendship commit the irreparable.

The Dardenne brothers once again sign a beautiful original screenplay to stigmatize a contemporary reality: African economic immigration to Europe. The friendship that unites Lokita and Tori stirs in the bond that unites them with their regretted country of origin, left to send money to their families. The attitude of their “employers” towards them is all the more cruel and revolting.

Faithful to realism, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne dig a little deeper into Tori and Lokita, by favoring the sequence shot which accentuates the veracity and develops the action in real time. But in agreement with a Cameroonian journalist at the end of the screening, the realism is however a little tarnished by the absence of an accent in these two young Africans who have just arrived from their native Benin, as if they had lived for ten years. in Belgium. A detail, but which reflects a negligence of which they are not customary and to which other cinemas, in particular American, are very attentive.

However, this downside does not affect Tori and Lokita which remains in the exact line of the cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Their social fiber is once again transposed into an intact humanist militancy, with their customary, remarkable and renewed formal outline.

Gender : drama
Director: Jean-Pierre and Jean-Luc Dardenne
Actors: Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj
Country : Belgium / France
Duration : 1h28
Exit : October 5, 2022
Distributer : Diaphana Cast

Summary: Today in Belgium, a young boy and a teenager who came alone from Africa oppose their invincible friendship to the difficult conditions of their exile.