Tori and Lokita

The latest from the multiple Palme d’Or winning Belgian duo the Dardenne Brothers is a tender portrait of two young West African migrants as they try to make it in the European immigration system. Inseparable friends Tori and Lokita are posing as siblings to try and secure permission for the older Lokita to stay on as a refugee. The authorities make it increasingly difficult for them to stay together as they struggle to make it. Never sentimental but heartbreakingly moving, Tori and Lokita is the finest Dardennes film for some time.

Our film tells the story of a friendship, a beautiful and intense friendship, not a betrayed friendship but an unfailing friendship. It wasn’t until we imagined such a friendship as the core of our film that we felt that our two main characters, Lokita and Tori, were coming to life as unique human beings, that they were moving beyond the media-defined image of those young migrants known as ‘unaccompanied foreign minors’, that they were becoming more than the mere illustration of a case, a situation, a theme or a subject. Not that their situation is unimportant. Far from it. On the contrary, their situation as exiled, solitary, exploited and humiliated adolescents has acquired a new dimension thanks to their friendship, which gained strength through their response to it and, unwittingly, our film has also become a denunciation of the violent and unjust situation experienced by these young people in exile in our country, in Europe.

Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne