Tori et Lokita

Splendid but difficult, wonderful but heartbreaking this is an important and excellent film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne written, directed and produced. It is not a happy film but it certainly thrilling and awful, it is surely 88 minutes of harrowing, anxiety. Tori and Lokita are 11 and 16 year old youngsters posing as brother and sister having to work in the drug cartel as she hopes she will eventually get a card so she can work. Obviously a couple of young and dispossessed Africans who had gone from home into Italy and then on to Belgium but nothing is easy. All the time it is fascinating and gripping while these two actors are so brilliant that we believe that is really happening.

In a land where you had dreamed of being free, of independence with your own autonomy, you find your shackled and confined, forced to break rules, committing crimes, with a state that will not give you liberty. Along with Tori you make do the best you can, adopted brother with whom you had made a plan, but the dealer has you trapped, the smugglers make you feel kidnapped, your money taken, you feel forsaken, abused, attacked.

Following the lives of two juvenile African immigrants who find themselves trapped in a cycle of despair and abuse. Joely Mbundu is outstanding as Lokita, as she desperately tries to make enough money to send home while taking care of Tori, who has agreed to act as her brother while she seeks permanent residency in Belgium.

This movie is really worth watching if you like the Dardenne brothers work. I am pleased to see that after all those years they are still efficient, motivated, that they have lost nothing of their talent, their wish to denounce social injustice and human behavior in general. They are genuinely the greatest specialists of this kind of social issues, the equivalent of Ken Loach if you prefer. This story is so compelling, moving, but cruel, painful, to watch, especially after the end. It belongs to their best work, but each of their film belongs to their best too.... I am ready to continue to wait for each of their films.

The Dardenne brothers' (Luc and Jean-Pierre) latest is another in their generally low key, but precisely well-observed tales. Adolescent Tori (Pablo Schils) and his older sister Lokita (Joely Mbundu) are African immigrants in Belgium who are fighting to remain in their new country together. Immigration officials are dubious of their claims with the elder woman being on particularly shaky ground.

The plot dynamics are, as is almost always the case with the Dardennes, less important than the day to day lives of the main characters. Tori and Lokita must not only deal with the government, but, also the prejudices of local law enforcement and citizenry, but, also an entire underground system which takes abusive advantage of their migrant status. It becomes an acutely painful reality that Tori and Lokita often are put in the position of breaking the law in order to remain "within" the law.

Schils and Mbundu have natural screen presences that transcend the dialogue. Their wills to survive shine through even if their characters may lack the ability to verbalize their struggle. Alban Ukaj is effective as a slimy local businessman who humiliates the immigrants even as he professes to be assisting them.

TORI AND LOKITA is a bit too brief to fully capture the totality of their lives, but, there's a humanity, and, for the Dardennes, even a bit of righteous anger that manages to make its points.

Tori and Lokita broke my heart. The final minutes of this drama played with my heart so unabashedly I had to resort to crying. Thinking of kids in my family, thinking of a little boy and a girl in my family who are so close to my heart. The Dardenne Brothers do their thing again in building a story that speaks volumes of the current, tried times. In here, they narrate the story of a boy and an elder girl who are hoping for a better life together in Belgium as siblings having left Africa as refugees. Yet in the developed world, they face rampant bureaucracy, corruption, child labour, and abuse. By the end of it all - it's the same story we all know - I was devastated. I may never watch this film again.

(Watched at the 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Trivandrum.)