Tori and Lokita

Award Winning films from Cornwall Film Festival

Tori and Lokita |  Dir Luc Dardenne and  Jean-Pierre Dardenne |  2022  |  Belgium/ France  |  Drama/ Thriller |  1h 28m

The Dardenne brothers’ Cannes prize-winner – a young boy and an adolescent girl who have travelled alone from Africa pit their invincible friendship against the difficult conditions of their exile.

The Dardennes’ distinctively humane and politically committed brand of realism has long focused on the vulnerable and dispossessed, but this account of life in today’s Europe – among their finest – is also their darkest. To obtain residence papers, teenager Lokita must convince the authorities that Tori – with whom she made the perilous journey from West Africa – is her younger brother. At the same time, to pay off the violent couple who smuggled them into Belgium, the pair deal drugs. They have only one another as support, but then they’re separated… Beautifully performed by its non-professional leads, written, shot and directed with seemingly effortless expertise, this is top-grade filmmaking: compassionate yet unsentimental, suspenseful yet shockingly relevant, and heartrendingly sad. (Geoff Andrew)  Content warning - Contains scenes of sexual abuse

Cornwall Film Festival has rated this film an 18.