Two Days, One Night

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Two Days, One Night (French: Deux jours, une nuit) earned Marion Cotillard an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress at the 87th ceremony in February 2015, Cotillard's second Academy Award acting nomination after her 2008 win for La Vie en Rose, and one of the rare French-language acting performances ever nominated by the Academy. The film also earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Film Not in the English Language at the 68th BAFTAs the same year.

The casting of Cotillard (a major international star with full Hollywood crossover capacity at the height of her career) was a substantial departure for the Dardennes, who had built their entire feature career around non-professional or near-non-professional Belgian leads. Cotillard had reportedly approached the brothers directly after seeing The Kid with a Bike (2011) and asking to work with them; the Dardennes specifically rewrote the central role for her after this approach. Their subsequent feature The Unknown Girl (2016) returned to a smaller-scale Belgian-led ensemble.

The film is the eighth Dardenne feature, made twenty-five years into their continuous filmmaking partnership; the brothers had won two Palmes d'Or by this point (Rosetta in 1999 and L'Enfant in 2005). The supporting cast includes Fabrizio Rongione, Catherine Salée, Olivier Gourmet, Pili Groyne and Hicham Slaoui. Cinematography is by Alain Marcoen, the Dardennes' regular collaborator, working in their characteristic handheld observational mode. The film was shot on location in Seraing, the post-industrial Walloon town near Liège that has served as the principal setting of nearly every Dardenne feature since the early 1990s.