Tori and Lokita

Two-time Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne returned to Cannes with Tori and Lokita (2022), where it received a special 75th Anniversary Prize. It is a characteristically lean, urgent work from the Belgian brothers who have spent three decades chronicling the lives of Europe's most precarious people with unflinching compassion.

Newcomers Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu play the two unaccompanied young migrants whose pretended kinship is the only security they have, navigating a Belgium of immigration offices, drug runners and predatory adults. The Dardennes shoot in their signature style — handheld, present-tense, stripped of music and sentiment — keeping the camera close to the children as the bureaucratic and criminal machinery closes around them. The effect is both documentary-plain and almost unbearably tense.

Critics recognised it as a continuation of the brothers' essential project, its anger at how Europe treats migrant children sharpened by the film's fierce focus on a single bond. Spare, gripping and morally serious, Tori and Lokita reaffirms the Dardennes as the conscience of European cinema — film-makers who turn social realism into something close to suspense, and who insist, again, that the invisible be seen. The non-professional leads give performances of raw immediacy, and the film extended the brothers' unbroken record of turning urgent social subjects into gripping, morally serious cinema that festivals and audiences alike take seriously.