La Promesse

The international breakthrough of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, La Promesse (1996) premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and established the moral and stylistic template the Belgian brothers would follow to two Palmes d'Or and beyond. After years in documentary, it was the film in which they found their distinctive voice.

Jérémie Renier, in his debut, plays Igor, the apprentice mechanic and reluctant accomplice to his father's exploitation of migrant workers, with Olivier Gourmet as the father and Assita Ouedraogo as the widow to whom Igor makes his fateful promise. The Dardennes shoot in their now-famous mode — handheld, close, present-tense, free of score — turning a teenager's crisis of conscience into a taut moral thriller. The film's power lies in watching a boy slowly, almost wordlessly, decide what kind of person he will be.

Critics recognised it immediately as the arrival of major talents, praising its unsentimental humanism and its refusal of easy resolution. Lean, gripping and ethically serious, La Promesse introduced the world to the Dardenne method and to their abiding subject — the dignity and difficulty of doing right in a world built to discourage it. It remains one of the essential films of 1990s European cinema. Renier's debut and Gourmet's performance launched a long association with the brothers, and the film introduced the world to the Dardenne method and to their abiding subject: the difficulty of doing right.