Jan 08, 2026
3 min read
Interviews with legendary French writers talk about their latest developments, motherhood, industrialization and the late Émilie Dequenne.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on the tradition of realism in European cinema.The Belgian brothers, now in their seventies, have spent nearly 40 years creating sympathetic and uncompromising dramas about the social and economic conditions of modern life, approaching each other in a direct and irreverent style that has been largely imitated across the international art house circuit, if rarely rivaling its emotional impact.
Using a mobile camera Using available light and hating film soundtracks or other distractions. Their deceptive style immediately creates attentive glances, because they usually target people on the margins of society. These are both types of characters they choose to observe. And it is the reality of their approach that some critics consider them to be great humanists of cinema.
Dardenne's latest film, Young Mothers , is set in the suburb of Cerenne-Liège, a post-industrial area that has long served as a geographic and socioeconomic anchor for their filmmaking.Set in a home for new mothers, the film follows five teenage women caught up in the vagaries of early parenthood.(Janaina Holloway Phukan) and Naima (Samya Hilmi) learn to care for their newborn children and themselves, they also develop an unexpected kind of sisterhood that proves uniquely at home.Abandonment and uncertainty
Winner of the Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last year, where the Dardens first won the Palme d'Or for "Rosetta" and "L'Enfant," "Young Mothers" (in American theaters this week through Music Box Films) are similar to those who won in the way they attract the power of traditional performances from mothers and mothers.complicated by the economic crisis.
In Chicago last fall for the Chicago International Film Festival, where they attended a special screening of "Young Mother," the Dardennes sat down to discuss their career-defining efforts to witness the post-industrial conditions of their hometown, the volatile construction of their latest film, and memories of working with the late Émilie Dequenne on "Rosetta" almost 30 years ago.
The interview was edited and summarized with the help of a translator.
You've stayed close to home throughout your career, with most of your films set in the suburbs of your hometown of Serain, on the banks of the Meuse River in Belgium.To begin with, I'm interested in asking broadly about filmmaking there, in the place you've been looking at for so long.It used to be a completely industrial area;today it is full of abandoned steel mills.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: In our youth, before we started filming, it was still an industrial town, even though it was towards the end of the 1960s.These are our memories from our youth and the entire youth period, when our entire personality was formed.Along the Meuse River, where the steelworks lived their heyday and later began to decline.We left this place to continue our studies because we heard the clock ticking.- and when we came back, in the twenties, with the idea of making documentaries, this urban and industrial decline was already underway.
Lux dardenne: As the years have been passed, the city became unstable and the industrialized, with empty buildings, closed fabrics, and all the streets were abandoned.Also, the sense of church is vilist;Then you discarded measures of blue for a breathing, from the building of the building of you, you are entered.We saw it in the first stages of our careers, when we started to make documentary.More nosy for no one can be found, and Melme may be rebuented.In our memories, to find the city, which she was.It is what you wait, and they are not mentioned that.
What did you observe then about the impact of recession and deindustrialization on the people of Seraing?The poverty and hardship you portray in your films was a multifaceted crisis, as unions collapsed, communities disappeared and families struggled.Religion, family, class solidarity, and hometown pride—none of these have the power they once had.Do you see your films as dealing directly with this loss?
JPD: When we returned to Seraing, it became clear that not only the city but also the population had decreased. But the social fabric began to collapse and be demolished, and the influx of drugs also played a role in this in the lower areas of the city. This tended to be the most densely populated area. Most of the immigrant families that used to live there included Italians and Poles. Moving to other suburbs or even further afield, they no longer lived there.Again, most have left. Except for the poorest and in the lower parts of the city. Many industrial buildings have been converted into housing for incoming immigrants.Not only was it abandoned. But there was also a complete change in population.
LD: This is what we see in our film "La Promesse (The Promise)".There is a parallel between what happened at the level of the nuclear family and what happened in the city;the unity, the sense of unity was lost.First, for example, you have a family where the father worked and the son more or less followed in his father's footsteps.He met and married a woman who was like a mother to him.But later the father became unemployed.The son has a father who has never seen work.Now he goes to school to learn a trade that no longer exists.But we knew such a family.The son doesn't have much respect for his unemployed father, who is always there and maybe works a little under the table, but otherwise does nothing.And his son is promised a job that has no future.We can see in these families how the future, the distance, is closed.And let's see how, as the drugs flowed, everything started to fall apart.
This is really a feeling that we try to show in "Promises", because for the first time in our lives, when we go back there, we see lonely young people.Not necessarily on drugs, but only on the road.We will find emptiness.And we told ourselves that we have to prove this.
JPD: The first version of the script for "La Promès" considered three generations of characters.You have a grandfather in his 60s with a long tradition of blue solidarity, but he observes his son, who is very angry at immigrants, without any sense of solidarity.He observes his grandson following his father's example and tells him:"Your father is wise. But then you find out that your ancestors are no more. They are gone or no longer exist. So the story is again based on a young man who has to re-establish a noble way of life, without support from previous generations."
I understand that "Young Mothers" began with your examination of the real archives, where you went to investigate one character in particular: Jessica (Babette Verbeek), this teenage mother struggling with the problem of abandonment and lack of connection with her mother.What did you like about this character at the beginning?It would seem that this represents the generational conflict you just described, for example.
JPD: The first version of the script was unfinished, but it was somehow focused on Jessica.A key point of it is that apart from what you said about her feeling of abandonment, she cannot bond with her newborn baby.That's the crux of the original script, in which she meets a young man who lives in an apartment near a recently released psychiatric facility.And that meeting allows Jessica to bond with her child.
Before developing this, we decided to see what a maternity hospital looks like.Then a friend told us, "But there is one five kilometers from your house."We didn't know that.We knew there was a maternity hospital in the area, but we didn't think so;That friend informed us about this house.
We went there, to that house, it was for minors, young women.We went many times to gather information.We talked a lot with the caretakers.There were no men.There were only women there.It was a female environment.We spent a long time there with the director, with the psychologist.And we were there... even though there were problems, we were attracted by the feeling of life that we experienced there.It wasn't heaven.But there was this kind of vitality that excited and fascinated us.And then we thought, "We have to make a movie here."It's not so much stability, but this sense of life moving forward, precariously evolving, and its fragility - that's what lifted us up.
LD: It was a place related to violence where all these girls came from - domestic violence, suffering, broken families, where the younger generations reproduce what the older ones do.And the maternity home appeared to us as a place that fights against all these cycle progressions.This home is a refuge where they can be safe, but it is more than that: it is a place that changes lives.
There are many failures in that house, and many young women who will not find their waySo, even though the reality is more difficult — with a lot of hardship, I would say, in the future of these young women and children — we told ourselves that in every story, ultimately, we're going to try to make sure that there's hope for every little girl.Without denying reality, we tried to do just that;We told those storiesWe tried to make it so that their path was not too closedAnd we made the film by following the paths of the various characters and locking in between the individual heroes, which sometimes intersect, making sure that at the end of the film everyone reaches some kind of opening for hope in their lives.
JPD: And it was when we were in the maternity hospital that we changed the scenario from one focused on one character to a film that explores five letters, but not a chorus of life, as we saw it.Is what lies in the construction of the film.ES is a sense of movement to this, even in the flow of one character to another.Dos was an attempt to present what we have seen there.
You chose to shoot in this mother's house.You practice a lot and shoot without artificial lighting.Your filmmaking style - all handheld, medium shots, close to these characters - works really well in this context because we can feel the emotional momentum even in these long series of takes.I want to ask about the scene that took place in Natalie's apartment at Ariana's mother's house.arrival?
LD: The key is here, the kernel of the music question you have asked, it is looking for a moment of feeling that we follow, in a long way we follow, at all of us.The whole problem we don't have to do, say, a moment of sharp in saying, "Yes, this way will be waiting for the future.We need to live in the truth.It's hard to explain.We can't establish the big necklace as a cycle.
JPD: We couldn't use inventions.It could not be overwritten.We had to tell a story, of course, but we couldn't manufacture a series of emotional cliffhangers.It had to feel more natural.We couldn't think, "We need to create a really intense moment of tension to keep the audience connected to the film."We had to bet that there would be moments of tension and moments of revelation that unfolded organically.It was necessary, but that does not mean exaggeration.That's what we had to find.
LD: The pacing, of course, also came when we recreated it in the editing room, because the shots are longer than what you see in the film.We cut in the editing room, but never too much.Our problem wasn't so much the film's structure.I already said, but we need to find the flow.And one movie that helped Jean-Pierre and me a lot, which we rewatched several times, was Kenji Mizoguchi's "Street of Shame."This is a movie that we enjoyed watching again because it is set in the same place.It is set in a brothel in Tokyo;You have a girl with you and no one else for a while, but then you focus on another girl, leave the previous one, and then come back to her.We had to risk losing one character and moving on to another without strong cliffhangers, then we'd come back to this previous character in a freer and more fluid way.
JPD: All of these characters have their own loneliness.There are some similarities between the stories, specific vibes they share, but they all go in their own directions.
You make the movies that shows the values of your pictures.However, there are a lot of people in the spirit of your film of your film, from the options you make and the secrets of mercy searches.
L.D.: Using Young Mothers as an example, we began to see this house as a place where all these young women could find a little humanity for the first time - from being there individually to being independent and seeing rays of light.This is what we think about when we think about grace.It's the idea of having a modicum of free will.We didn't know how this would happen to one of the characters.When we decided to make a film with multiple actors, we realized that they would have to read about their experiences in order to see it.light.We didn't know, for example, how Jessica would handle her relationship with her mother or whether the door would end up being closed as a sign of hope.
JPD: What was also important to us was that all these women around these young mothers should also have a presence, that their presence is often there throughout the film.The frames of the nursery are rarely closed around one person;at the maternity hospital, there is always someone else in the frame.There is often the child's mother there, or there is someone else who loves them.Throughout the film, in our direction, we had to constantly think about this: in every shot, in every sequence shot, there are moments when the nurses, the caregivers, the little girl, they are there.Also, if the girls find some kind of light, even if it is fragile, it is also thanks to what they experience, and also thanks to the nurses around them.Within the support systems in these places, decisions are made by everyone to find a sense of individual freedom of action through a support permit.This is a new family structure.We wanted to represent the warmth, the sweetness of this place for girls who previously had no one who didn't know
LD: The spiritual dimension comes into play in situations of economic or emotional distress.That's what all young women want, wealth, possessions, love, wealth, possessions.
What happens in the mother house is that there is a connection, accepting the need of the other.There is something, the answer to this poverty and this lack of connection.
Mother's house accepts this need, all the girls meet someone who helps them, like Pearl's sister, Angela, and especially at the end of the teacher and his music, his music.Finally, thanks to another, this girl comes back to life.We can see his life in a different way.his wedding.That's really what we want to talk about in this film, which is to help each other, to love each other.
JPD: The meaning of spirituality comes from being in a place of need, in a situation of poverty, and discovering for the first time that there is a space where other people can be strong enough to support themselves and others.Sometimes the girls help each other, and then all the women around them do.In the scene where Jessica's mother opens the door for her daughter and invites her in, something happens without Jessica saying anything or us explaining it explicitly.This grandmother changed in front of the camera, and it was the result of Jessica's first spiritual experience through her mother's home support network.This even affects these third parties;In the scene where Jessica meets her mother at work, a transformation occurs for both of them.
It must have been an emotional experience watching this film at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, given the recent passing of Emily Deacon, who won Best Actress a quarter of a century ago for her role in Rosetta.If you would be so kind, what are your fondest memories of working with Deacon on that set, in terms of his role in your films?
LD: I saw her in the audition and I saw what Émilie brought to the table.It was exceptional and came twice.The second time we shot two scenes.The first scene was particularly good.You may remember the scene where Rosetta is fired from her job at the waffle shop.Her boss decides to hire her son and fire her.She refuses and clings to a heavy bag of flour and pleads with the baker that she doesn't want to lose her job.
Well, we don't have a bag of flour in the casting - we have a table and we put him behind and tell him it's a waffle stand. We tell him, "You keep on the table and we will try to pry you off."In the scene, we said to her, "You have to understand that you don't have this job anymore. I will give it to my son," but Emily refused to accept it. Even if she or I could ask her to give up control of the table. Emily was so invested in the character that it was almost impossible to remove her. We looked at each other and said, "She really wants this job."[Laugh]
Then, later in the film, there's a scene where Rosetta is carrying the propane tank and trips under the weight of it, collapsing in tears... The first thing to say about this is that we didn't have a gas tank during the audition.We had arranged plastic chairs and she carried about ten of them while acting out the scene.We weren't sure how that was going to play out, with all the chairs in the way, but it was the way she completely melted, crying during the scene that won us over: "This is you. You are this role. You are Rosetta."
JPD: I have another memory with the costumes for "Rosetta."We thought how she would wear them with these rubber boots and she tried them on.At one point, we said we were going into town to shoot a scene, and we turned around to see her taking off her shoes to put on the ones she brought with her.We asked, "Why are you taking off your shoes?"Not knowing what we were going to shoot, she said, "I'm not going to town wearing these."And it affected us.We—because we thought that's what that person was doing.He was already playing this role and pretending not to know the story we wanted to tell.
LD: At Cannes, when she won the award, for the first time, we saw an Emily with her back turned as she went up the stairs to the stage.When the film went to Cannes, she was worried about being forced to play that kind of character alone, so she created a dressing point for Carn.Ending.
“Young Mother” opens in New York theaters on January 9th and will be expanded by Music Box Films in the following weeks.
