The Dardenne brothers’ Cannes prize-winning film about the plight of two teenage African migrants struggling to survive in Belgium is characteristically gripping and deeply sobering.

In modern-day Belgium, a young woman called Lokita (Mbundu Joely) and a boy called Tori (Pablo Schils), have endured a terrible journey from West Africa together to the promised land of the EU and are now in a children’s home for immigrants. Lokita must now convince the authorities that Tori is her younger brother, whilst still needing to pay off the violent smugglers who transported them.

The Dardennes’ distinctively humane 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. A parable of inequality and injustice among the marginalised, Tori and Lokita is a sombre reminder of what thousands of young people today are facing across Europe.

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