Tori and Lokita

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, already twice winners of the Palme d'Or, returned to Cannes with Tori and Lokita (2022) and received a special 75th Anniversary Prize. It is lean and urgent in the brothers' usual manner; for three decades the Belgian pair have filmed 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, in a Belgium of immigration offices, drug runners and predatory adults. The Dardennes shoot in their signature style, handheld and present tense, with no music and no sentiment, and keep the camera close to the children as the bureaucratic and criminal machinery closes around them. It looks as plain as a documentary and plays as almost unbearably tense.

Critics saw it as a continuation of the brothers' central project, its anger at how Europe treats migrant children sharpened by the film's focus on a single bond. The non-professional leads give performances of raw immediacy. Few film-makers can turn social realism into something this close to suspense, and in Tori and Lokita the Dardennes do it again, insisting once more that the invisible be seen. The film extends their unbroken record of taking urgent social subjects and making gripping, morally serious cinema out of them, the kind that festivals and ordinary audiences both take seriously.