Tori and Lokita

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.

Considering there is debut for both in main cast, Joely Mbundu and Pablo Schils, no doubt they gave top of performances. The chemistry between is so touchable and we can feel their natural bond through that acting. It is the picture how usually goes that process of adaptation of refugees in foreign territory, which does not favor them with good intentions. I didn't expect to see such a good movie, by that fact that I didn't have in my schedule at all to see it during one movie festival, but suddenly changed my mind and entered that cinema hall where it started to play. I wasn't wrong. If you decide to see it, you will follow a strong emotionally and at the end sad story, after watching it, it will stay in your memory.

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.)

Before I begin this review, I should note that I am Belgian myself, and that I therefore happily applaud any movie originating from my country as there aren't many of them releasing.

That being said, this film might leave you a little unsatisfied. The story is about an immigrant girl trying to get an allowance to remain in Belgium instead of having to return to her country of origin. Meanwhile, she has to take care of her younger brother.

The story itself is intriguing and honestly quite interesting to see. A lot of it feels very realistic and profound, and that dept to the characters is felt through their connections to other characters. However, the writing, at times, is not so good. The dialogue given to a small boy doesn't fully feel appropriate, nor does it feel very intentional to make him feel more mature. It contains a lot of sentences that a child that young just wouldn't say.

At the other hand, the actor who plays the young brother Tori did his job very well. He plays the boy in a very dynamic and organic style and deserves quite a bit of praise. This can, sadly, not be said about the lead of this movie, Lokita. She is played quite blandly, with very stiff dialogue and, and this does disappoint me quite a bit, a feeling as if she just reciting her lines. Her actions feel as if they are just being read from the script, and although this isn't completely the fault of the directors, and I'm sure the actress did her best as well, this does hurt the movie quite a bit.

The plot of the film is quite complex in that it is, as I said above, quite a realistic picture, yet also not a straightforward one. There are a lot of situations where choices need to be made that don't seem to be the good ones, yet they are the only ones the characters can make to survive. The plot is also quite good, really, with one big problem. It ends way to soon.

The film is just shy of an hour and a half, yet it feels as if it was written as a two hour picture. The last half hour seems to have just been forgotten, leaving a lot of subplots, but also just the main plot, unresolved, which is in more than one way very unsatisfying. It really feels as if they had two hours of a picture, noticed too late that the deadline was due the day after, and just wrapped it up. I am sure that isn't what happened. It is just a way of describing the feeling I had leaving the theatre, but knowing that this was an intentional choice only makes it worse.

So overall, it is a film with a few ups and downs. It has a great premise, and a few scenes that will really move you and even take you to the edge of your seat, but it fails quite dramatically on other facets, mainly the ending, dialogue and lead. It is therefore not necessarily a movie I would suggest to others, but if you watch it, I'm sure you won't feel as if you wasted money on a ticket either.

The Dardenne brothers normally pick an acute topic, mainly a social one, then feed it with a story and they have never failed to very accurately reflect the reality we are living in bringing their message to our heads and our hearts and making us ruminate on lots of things.

This time, they opted for the topic of clandestine children smuggled to Europe, desperately trying to survive in the world they believe in. We can see to what extremes they are ready to go in order to stay here and we know this is no game and there is absolutely no way back.

Terrifyingly real, tragic, moving, eye-opening, brilliant.