• "Tori and Lokita" won the Prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

  • This is the first time that the Dardenne brothers have called on young neophytes to play the two main roles in the film: unaccompanied minors, exiled from Africa in Belgium.

  • "Tori and Lokita" is both an adventure film, a suspense film and a film denouncing the violence suffered by children trapped in a fate from which they have no chance of escaping.

A film with children is not necessarily a children's film.

Tori and Lokita

, the new film by the Dardenne brothers crowned with the Prize of the 75th Cannes Film Festival tells the story of two young African exiles, "unaccompanied minors" who, after having crossed Africa and Europe, do not owe their survival than to their reciprocal friendship and their unfailing solidarity.

An adventure film rich in suspense for which Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have, for the first time, taken the risk of entrusting the two main roles to young neophytes, the formidable Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu.

Replica directors

It was impossible for the two brothers to rely this time on an Olivier Gourmet who had helped them direct Jérémie Renier in

La Promesse

, or on a Cécile de France with Thomas Doret for

Le Garçon au vélo

.

"We did what we don't usually do," says Luc Dardenne to

20 Minutes

.

We played a little ourselves”.

By giving them the line, by guiding them to find the right gesture or the right posture in front of the camera.

Sometimes, the young Pablo Schils suggested “counter-proposals which were good proposals, underlines Jean-Pierre Dardenne.

He participated like that in the construction of his character and it gave him confidence ”.

Luc Dardenne takes an example from a scene where Tori has to wake up Lokita who is sleeping.

“He didn't want to lie next to her for fear that images would end up on social media.

So he thought and said, "What if I put my hands on her like that?"

But he was almost touching her breast!

The anecdote would be amusing if the film weren't so bitter, hard, cruel.

“You have to have strong nerves to play what they play, concedes Jean-Pierre Dardenne.

It's always the fear we have when we start working, because it takes pleasure.

With novice actors, a shoot should not become a permanent examination.

»

A terrible reality

The Dardennes consider themselves happy to have found "two kids with a lot of character, a lot of autonomy, and class" to denounce without emphasis the violence suffered by these young exiles trapped in a destiny to which they do not. have no chance of escaping.

"In Belgium, but also throughout Europe, hundreds of young migrants disappear from the radar of the police and social services," they explain.

Not because they left for England or they are sent home, but because they go into hiding or because they are killed and no one claims the body of an unaccompanied minor without family .

When we allow ourselves in a society to kill a child, whatever the way it happens, we can say that it is not right.

It is a terrible reality, like all those that we have always tried to tell.

»


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