A Film That Is Also a Handshake: Dardenne Brothers × 3
Screening Dates
  • July 7, 2023 6:30
  • July 9, 2023 8:45
  • July 14, 2023 8:45
  • July 17, 2023 6:30

“The Dardennes’ strongest, most dramatically persuasive film in years.”

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Widely hailed as a return to form for two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tori and Lokita ranks among the best and most vitriolic works by the veteran auteurs. The film, set in the brothers’ customary moral universe of Liège, Belgium, centres on the inseparable bond between two African immigrants—12-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 17-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu)—whose hardscrabble lives include extortion by smugglers and peddling drugs for an abusive trattoria chef (Alban Ukaj). When Lokita is faced with deportation, she ups her involvement in the underworld to pay for counterfeit papers, inadvertently siloing herself from Tori. Told with narrative economy and a degree of formal rigour not seen since the high-water marks of the directors’ turn-of-the-aughts filmmaking, this harrowing portrait of a beyond-blood siblingship is at once an aching testament of love and a trenchant indictment of society’s apathy toward those it renders Other.

In French with English subtitles

75th Anniversary Prize
Cannes Film Festival 2022

“One of the most devastating cinematic experiences I’ve had in a long time … [The Dardennes’] mastery is inseparable from their spiritual and ethical commitment to their characters … [This is] one of their greatest.”

Martin Scorsese

“Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s strongest work in nearly a decade … The filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and their compassion is inseparable from their rage.”

Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
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