BE, FR | 2011 | colour | 87 min
dir | Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne pro | Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd wr | Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne ph | Benoit Dervaux mus | Jean-Pierre Duret ed | Marie-Hélène Dozo cast |Cécile de France, Thomas Doret, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Egon Di Mateo, Olivier Gourmet dis | Carisma Film Group

11 year old Cyril has only one plan: to find the father who left him temporarily in a children’s home. By chance he meets Samantha (Cécile de France), who runs a hairdressing salon and agrees to let him stay with her at weekends. Cyril doesn’t recognize the love Samantha feels for him, a love he desperately needs to calm his rage. The new Dardenne brothers’ film, who already established a naturalistic and pessimistic style, this time surprises with a brighter esthetics. An abandoned child, deprived of maternal love and care is being saved by goodness of a strange woman – a goodness willingly unfounded (we know nothing about Samantha’s past) immanent to human nature just as inexplicably as evil. 

AWARDS
2011 Cannes Film Festival – Grand Prize of the Jury
2011 Cannes Film Festival – Palme d’Or nomination

DIRECTOR | Jean-Pierre Dardenne (1951), Luc Dardenne (1954)
An acclaimed Belgian filmmakers duo. In 1975, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne created Dérives, the production company that has produced some sixty documentaries. In 1994, they set up the production company Les Films du Fleuve. As feature-filmmakers the Dardennes first came to international attention in the mid-1990s with La Promesse (The Promise). They won their first major international film prize when Rosetta won the Palme d’Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. All their films since have played at the Cannes main competition and won one of the major prizes.