A Film That Is Also Dardenne Brothers × 3 July 7–18

July 7 (Friday)

6:30 pm

July 9 (Sunday) 8:45 pm

July 14 (Friday) 8:45 pm

July 17 (Monday) 6:30 pm

In September 2020, The Cinematheque mounted its first retrospective dedicated to Belgian fraternal filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Titled “A Film That Is Also a Handshake” after a maxim set down in Luc’s published diary, the series showcased six features from the distinguished, philosophically inclined social realists, but excluded (for pandemic-related reasons) two of their most exemplary works: 1999’s Palme d’Or winner Rosetta, one of the final masterpieces of the last century, and 2002’s The Son, one of the first masterpieces of the new century. We are delighted to present those films, newly restored, in a series-addendum program that also includes the brothers’ much-lauded latest, Tori and Lokita, a picture that hearkens back, in ethics and aesthetics, to those seminal earlier works.

Tori and Lokita

(Tori et Lokita)

Belgium/France 2022

Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

88 min. DCP

In French with English subtitles

New Cinema

“One of their greatest.”

Martin Scorsese

Widely hailed as a return to form for two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tori and Lokita ranks among the best and most vitriolic works by the veteran auteurs. The film, set in the brothers’ customary moral universe of Liège, Belgium, centres on the inseparable bond between two African immigrants—12-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 17-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu)—whose hardscrabble lives include extortion by smugglers and peddling drugs for an abusive trattoria chef (Alban Ukaj). When Lokita is faced with deportation, she ups her involvement in the underworld to pay for counterfeit papers, inadvertently siloing herself from Tori. Told with narrative economy and a degree of formal rigour not seen since the high-water marks of the directors’ turn-of-the-aughts filmmaking, this harrowing portrait of a beyond-blood siblingship is at once an aching testament of love and a trenchant indictment of society’s apathy toward those it renders Other.