Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are filmmakers who have relentlessly pursued their own course. Their mature works, La Promesse, Rosetta, and Le Films, eschew the trappings of mainstream cinema to present an unflinching look at the battle for survival in contemporary Europe. Perry Ogden met up with them in Belgium to discuss their work to date, and their latest Palme d'Or-winning feature L'Enfant.

If you want to see the purest and most distilled cinema being made today, then look no further than the Dardenne brothers. Well versed in the films of Rossellini, Fassbinder, Loach, Kieslowski, Oshima, Cassavetes, and early Scorsese, they are in the company of Francis Ford Coppola and Emir Kusturica as the only directors to have won the Palme d'Or twice. Initially based in the French speaking Belgian city of Liège, they started out in the mid-Seventies working with Armand Gatti, the socially commit-ed Belgian playwright and filmmaker, before making their own videos and documentaries on local social issues. They came to Derry in 1981 with Gatti (Jean-Pierre as first assistant cameraman, and Luc as first assistant director) to work on the feature The Writing on the Wall, and made their own first feature Falsch some years later. But it was no easy route into feature films as they struggled to establish their own personal vision.

It wasn't until La Promesse (The Promise) in 1996, which was filmed in Seraing – a post-industrial town south west of Liège where they have made all their films since – that they found their own gritty yet poetic realist style, and finally broke through onto the world stage. Since then they have made Rosetta (1999), which won the Palme d'Or and the Best Actress award for Émilie Dequenne at Cannes in 1999, Le Fils (The Son), which won Best Actor for Olivier Gourmet at Cannes in 2002, and L'Enfant (The Child) which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. There is a strong moral core to their films, but with a twist – a certain ambiguity – because they know that life is never that simple.

In L'Enfant, eigtheen year-old Sonia has just given birth to a son, Jimmy, but Jimmy's father, Bruno, is immersed in a life of small-time crime and is more interested in money than his new born son – until he realises that there is a way of making money from his son.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.