Latest news with #YoungMothers
eNCA
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- eNCA
'Outstanding' Dardenne brothers teenage mothers movie has Cannes in tears
CANNES - Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose inspiring new film "Young Mothers" won the best screenplay prize at Cannes on Saturday, said they wanted to show young women defying the fate that was forced on them. Set at a shelter for underage mothers, it follows five teenagers as they learn to look after their babies with the help of kind nurses and social workers. The film shows how each of them frees "themselves from a destiny... that has been imposed on them, and the journey they have to go on to free themselves of this fate that has been chasing them since childhood," Jean-Pierre Dardenne told AFP. The brothers, already two-time Palme d'Or winners, visited a similar shelter as part of research for another film. "It's really the place that made us decide to make this film," Jean-Pierre Dardenne said before its premiere in Cannes on Friday. AFP | Miguel MEDINA "When I say place, it's also the young women, the educators, the psychologist, the director who drew us in, what was happening there, what we felt," he added. "It's as if the place, these people, said: 'Tell our stories.'" The film has received rave reviews, and on Friday also won the unofficial Positive Cinema Prize for the most upbeat film in the main competition. The Guardian newspaper called it "quietly outstanding" and gave it a rare five-star review, while Variety called it "the duo's most convincing film yet". In the movie, Naima leaves the shelter to start life as a single mother. But Julie, a former addict, is still struggling to find her feet, while heavily pregnant Jessica is desperately trying to renew ties with the woman who gave her up as a teenager. Perla and Ariane are striving to become better examples to their babies than their own alcoholic mothers. - 'Babies just do their thing' - "They are individual destinies," said Luc Dardenne. "What we were interested in was to tell the stories of five people going through five different things, even if of course it's always linked to a relationship with a child." The film "looks at how social history, poverty, the fact that your own mother abandoned you, weighs down on each character... and how to fight this," he said. AFP | Antonin THUILLIER The brothers said filming most scenes with real babies had forced them to work differently. "Babies don't know that they're being filmed. So babies just do their thing," said Luc Dardenne. "So we said to ourselves that we would try to have one take, just one take, and be happy with it. Sometimes we had to do two takes," he said. "I must admit that the takes weren't the same thanks to the babies, which gave a different pace to the film." Asked how they felt about reducing even the most hardened critics to tears at the screening, Jean-Pierre said, "Perhaps it's because one day we were all babies." - A 'voice to the voiceless' - The brothers have created their own brand of cinema, telling stories of the poorest and most disadvantaged without pity or pathos. The Belgians won the first of their Palme d'Ors in 1999 with "Rosetta", starring Emilie Dequenne, one of many extraordinary non-professional actors they discovered. She died in March, tragically young at 43, after carving out a career as one of the most distinctive faces of French-language film. AFP | Julie SEBADELHA The brothers, who began making documentaries in the late 1970s, rarely stray far from their hometown of Liege for their films. The region has long been plagued with poverty and joblessness, and both say they try to give a "voice to the voiceless". The authenticity of their stories has long been their trademark, with the latest tender babies-having-babies tale feeling so realistic that many critics said it felt like a documentary. The Dardennes won their second Palme d'Or in 2005 with "The Child", taking the second prize Grand Prix in 2011 with "The Kid with a Bike", which was nominated for a Golden Globe. by Raphaelle Peltier and Alice Hackman
The Age
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Arson, dissidents and jabs at Trump: The biggest moments from the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Overall, it was a good festival for young women. The Dardenne brothers' Young Mothers, about a group of girls in a Belgian shelter for single mothers, won best script. The Little Sister star Nadia Melliti won best actress for her portrayal of a teenage girl in a traditional Moroccan family living in France who realises she is attracted to women. And the superb German film Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski, about four women living in different eras on a remote farm, shared the jury prize with Sirat, by French director Oliver Laxe, which kicks off at a rave in the Moroccan desert, where the drugged-up dancers have little idea that war is on the doorstep. And so much more that was worth seeing, even if it didn't win anything. Keep eyes peeled for Julie Ducournau's Alpha, her follow-up to Titane and just as confrontingly weird; Romería, Carla Simon's semi-autobiographical search for the story of her parents, who died of AIDS in '80s Spain; and the glorious Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's French-language imagining of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's pivotal film Breathless. Watching young French actor Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, permanently behind sunglasses and smoking like a tramp steamer, was one of Cannes' greatest pleasures. Trading places Three debut films by big-name actors screened in various sections of the festival: enough to constitute a trend. Scarlett Johansson's Eleanor the Great, starring 95-year-old June Squibb as an American-born Jew who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor to make new friends, was not a hit: critics found itsentimental, offensively cloth-eared about the significance of survivor status or, in the worst reviews, both. Kristen Stewart's The Chronology of Water, a young woman's tortured story of survival, was emotionally raw but formally complex – all rapid cuts, odd angles and muddled timescales – in a way that puts it out of the running for multiplex play. The most warmly received was Urchin by Harris Dickinson – the beefcake boy from Triangle of Sadness – whose film featured a bravura performance by Frank Dillane as a London street-dweller. Definitely watch out for that one. Political realities Robert De Niro set the tone for this year's festival on opening night, where he used his acceptance speech for an honorary Palme d'Or to have a dig at the ' philistine president ' of the United States where people 'are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted'. President Donald Trump's mooted 100 per cent tariffs on films 'made in foreign lands' didn't seem to dampen the market, which exists to sell films internationally and enable co-production deals. But it drew scorn from director Wes Anderson in a press conference for his typically whimsical film The Phoenician Scheme. 'The tariff is fascinating because of the 100 per cent. I feel this means Trump is saying he's going to take all the money,' he mused acidly. He also wondered whether a movie could be held up in customs. 'I feel it doesn't ship that way.' Cannes continued to declare its support for Ukraine, including an entire day of documentaries about its continuing resistance to the Russian invasion, while more than 900 actors and filmmakers signed an open letter condemning the continuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza, declaring themselves 'ashamed' of their industry's 'passivity' in the face of the siege. On the opening night, Jury president Juliette Binoche paid tribute to photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was killed in an Israeli air strike the day after learning that a documentary about her work, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, had been chosen to screen in Cannes. Hassouna's portrait hung in the press room for the festival's duration. But perhaps the most vivid political presence was Julian Assange, who posed for the cameras wearing a white T-shirt inscribed 'Stop Israel' and bearing the names of 4986 Palestinian children killed in Gaza. He was in Cannes to support Eugene Jarecki's documentary about his work, The Six Billion Dollar Man. Cannes craziness Loading Before the power failure, the biggest disaster on the Croisette came right at the beginning, when tumultuous winds blew down one of the Riviera beach's famous palm trees, injuring a passing Japanese producer. The natural world isn't usually much of a felt presence in Cannes, but there was a more cheerful story about one of the biggest luxury hotels, the Majestic, employing a falconer and team of hawks to chase away seagulls that dive-bomb celebrity plates and have been known to make off with entire lobsters. Shark attack Australia didn't have a film in competition, but Sean Byrne's bloody genre romp Dangerous Animals had a triumphant showing in the parallel program of the Directors' Fortnight before its release in Australia next month. Women screamed as Jai Courtney, playing an ocker villain obsessed with shark behaviour, dangled his kidnapped shark bait over the side of his tour boat.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Arson, dissidents and jabs at Trump: The biggest moments from the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Overall, it was a good festival for young women. The Dardenne brothers' Young Mothers, about a group of girls in a Belgian shelter for single mothers, won best script. The Little Sister star Nadia Melliti won best actress for her portrayal of a teenage girl in a traditional Moroccan family living in France who realises she is attracted to women. And the superb German film Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski, about four women living in different eras on a remote farm, shared the jury prize with Sirat, by French director Oliver Laxe, which kicks off at a rave in the Moroccan desert, where the drugged-up dancers have little idea that war is on the doorstep. And so much more that was worth seeing, even if it didn't win anything. Keep eyes peeled for Julie Ducournau's Alpha, her follow-up to Titane and just as confrontingly weird; Romería, Carla Simon's semi-autobiographical search for the story of her parents, who died of AIDS in '80s Spain; and the glorious Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's French-language imagining of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's pivotal film Breathless. Watching young French actor Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, permanently behind sunglasses and smoking like a tramp steamer, was one of Cannes' greatest pleasures. Trading places Three debut films by big-name actors screened in various sections of the festival: enough to constitute a trend. Scarlett Johansson's Eleanor the Great, starring 95-year-old June Squibb as an American-born Jew who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor to make new friends, was not a hit: critics found itsentimental, offensively cloth-eared about the significance of survivor status or, in the worst reviews, both. Kristen Stewart's The Chronology of Water, a young woman's tortured story of survival, was emotionally raw but formally complex – all rapid cuts, odd angles and muddled timescales – in a way that puts it out of the running for multiplex play. The most warmly received was Urchin by Harris Dickinson – the beefcake boy from Triangle of Sadness – whose film featured a bravura performance by Frank Dillane as a London street-dweller. Definitely watch out for that one. Political realities Robert De Niro set the tone for this year's festival on opening night, where he used his acceptance speech for an honorary Palme d'Or to have a dig at the ' philistine president ' of the United States where people 'are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted'. President Donald Trump's mooted 100 per cent tariffs on films 'made in foreign lands' didn't seem to dampen the market, which exists to sell films internationally and enable co-production deals. But it drew scorn from director Wes Anderson in a press conference for his typically whimsical film The Phoenician Scheme. 'The tariff is fascinating because of the 100 per cent. I feel this means Trump is saying he's going to take all the money,' he mused acidly. He also wondered whether a movie could be held up in customs. 'I feel it doesn't ship that way.' Cannes continued to declare its support for Ukraine, including an entire day of documentaries about its continuing resistance to the Russian invasion, while more than 900 actors and filmmakers signed an open letter condemning the continuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza, declaring themselves 'ashamed' of their industry's 'passivity' in the face of the siege. On the opening night, Jury president Juliette Binoche paid tribute to photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was killed in an Israeli air strike the day after learning that a documentary about her work, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, had been chosen to screen in Cannes. Hassouna's portrait hung in the press room for the festival's duration. But perhaps the most vivid political presence was Julian Assange, who posed for the cameras wearing a white T-shirt inscribed 'Stop Israel' and bearing the names of 4986 Palestinian children killed in Gaza. He was in Cannes to support Eugene Jarecki's documentary about his work, The Six Billion Dollar Man. Cannes craziness Loading Before the power failure, the biggest disaster on the Croisette came right at the beginning, when tumultuous winds blew down one of the Riviera beach's famous palm trees, injuring a passing Japanese producer. The natural world isn't usually much of a felt presence in Cannes, but there was a more cheerful story about one of the biggest luxury hotels, the Majestic, employing a falconer and team of hawks to chase away seagulls that dive-bomb celebrity plates and have been known to make off with entire lobsters. Shark attack Australia didn't have a film in competition, but Sean Byrne's bloody genre romp Dangerous Animals had a triumphant showing in the parallel program of the Directors' Fortnight before its release in Australia next month. Women screamed as Jai Courtney, playing an ocker villain obsessed with shark behaviour, dangled his kidnapped shark bait over the side of his tour boat.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Young Mothers' Review: The Dardenne Brothers Bring Clear-Sighted Observation and Empathy to a Tender Snapshot of Women at a Crossroads
The stripped-down aesthetic principles, compassionate humanism and naturalistic purity in the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make their body of work uncommonly cohesive. It's easy to be glib about the influential Belgian brothers and say you know exactly what you're getting with a new Dardenne film — much like their social realist counterpart across the North Sea, Ken Loach, whose films they began helping to produce in 2009. But anticipating the form, the political leanings or broad thematic concerns of a movie is not the same as knowing in advance where it will take you, what kind of marginalized lives it will illuminate. Ever since their international breakthrough in the 1990s with La Promesse and Rosetta, there's always been the capacity to surprise in a Dardenne movie. Their latest, Young Mothers (Jeunes Mères), is the filmmakers' most surprising work in years. It provides unfiltered emotional access to the anxieties and hopes of five vulnerable working-class teenage women and the babies requiring their love and care, often when they can barely care for themselves. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes Power Outage Disrupts City, Festival Continues Inside IMG's Huge Sports Production Weekend: From English, U.S., Saudi Soccer to Basketball and F1 'Honey Don't!' Review: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans Get Stranded in Ethan Coen's Wayward Whodunit The project was hatched out of a visit by the Dardennes to a maternal support home near Liège, with the initial aim of developing a story about one young mother struggling to connect with her baby. But they were so struck by what they witnessed there — among the mothers as well as the nursing, counseling and administrative staff — that they expanded their plans to build a multicharacter ensemble piece. That alone marks a shift for the writer-directors, whose work tends predominantly to lock in on one or two main characters. It also allows them to draw even more than usual on their background in documentary. Young Mothers is closer to docu-fiction than any of their recent work. It follows the struggles of four women, three of them with newborns and one who's pregnant with a looming due date, plus a fifth whose stay at the shelter is nearing its end. Just two weeks away from giving birth, Jessica (Babette Verbeek) waits in an agitated state at a bus stop where she has organized to meet her biological mother Morgane (India Hair), who gave her up for adoption when she was younger than her daughter is now. Both before and after the arrival of her baby, Jessica longs to understand the reasoning behind her mother's decision, and to know if she ever felt remorse. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) has given birth to a son while the boy's father, Robin (Gunter Duret), was in juvenile detention. She brings him a spliff to celebrate his release, but Robin shows little affection for her and barely even looks at their child. While Perla has signed out of the shelter for several hours, expecting to spend the day with him, Robin can't get away fast enough. Perla faints when she gets back, and another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), massages her to knead the numbness out of her body. Fifteen-year-old Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) wants to put her infant daughter in foster care and finish school. Her mother Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), who talked her out of having an abortion, is against that plan, insisting she can help raise the child. But Nathalie is a drunk who has been in an abusive relationship with a violent man. At first, she coaxes Ariane to visit by assuring her that she has quit drinking and dumped the guy, but there are signs that indicate otherwise. Growing impatient with her daughter's rebukes, Nathalie snaps, 'He hit me worse than he hit you.' Julie and her baby's sweet-natured father, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are both recovering addicts. They leave their young daughter at a childcare facility while they go across town to see a subsidized apartment where they hope to live as a family. Dylan, a baker's apprentice, wants to marry her; their journey on his moped is one of the film's loveliest sequences, an image of freedom and happiness that suggests such a life might be within reach. But there are hiccups. Setbacks are as much a part of these women's realities as their tentative steps forward, yearning to carve out better lives for themselves and their children. One incentive to keep trying is the success of Naïma (Samia Hilmi), who is preparing to move with her child into their own flat and is on track to secure a job as a railway ticket inspector. Her sendoff from the shelter, with cake served outside in the garden, is one of many affecting displays of solidarity. Others have a bumpier path: Julie relapses into drug use and anxiety attacks; Perla refuses to read the obvious signs that Robin has no interest in settling down with her or becoming a hands-on father; Jessica keeps hitting a wall with her mother and has a hostile encounter with the unsympathetic parents of her baby's father, who run what appears to be a successful gym. They demand to know what she wants from their son, insisting that she's to blame for her situation since she declined to have the abortion they offered to pay for. The filmmakers thread these stories seamlessly into a larger picture that balances despair with moments that point cautiously toward a more stable future. There's never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it's simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created. DP Benoît Dervaux's camera is always attentive, never intrusive or fussy, and the use of only available light adds to the documentary-like authenticity of the stories. Possibly the single most gorgeous moment in the movie happens when one of the mothers, bracing for the wrenching separation of putting her baby into foster care, straps the infant into a car seat. If you don't melt when you see the blissful smile that spreads across the baby's adorable face and lights up her eyes, I suspect you're a terrible person. As attuned as they are to the harsh experiences of characters living bare-bones existences on the fringes of society, the Dardennes have never been doom-peddling fatalists. That aspect is clear in a number of beautiful forward-facing scenes — Ariane writing a letter for her daughter to read when she turns 18; Jessica breaking through and being able to communicate with Morgane when her dogged determination pays off; Perla having a blowup fight with her older half-sister, Angèle (Joely Mbundu), but then reconciling with genuine warmth and an offer of support; and especially, Julie and Dylan taking their baby to visit a former music teacher who helped them both. The Dardennes are not in the business of offering easy fixes for their characters' difficulties. But when the teacher sits at the piano to begin the child's introduction to music, Mozart's 'Rondo a la Turca' sounds like a hymn of triumphant resilience and elation. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Young Mothers' Review: Taut and Tender Drama About a Home for Teenage Moms Shows What the Dardennes Do Best
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes have settled into a comfortable niche over the course of 13 feature films. Well-researched social-realist depictions of marginalized people butting up against intransigent institutions is the way the record goes. To be fair to les frères Dardennes, there is a reliable level of unshowy competence as well as an integrity to their insistence on embedding with unglamorous, recognizable people. All the while, they facilitate other filmmakers in bringing related French and Belgian slice-of-life visions to fruition. They helped to produce one of the best debuts of last year, 'Julie Keeps Quiet' by Leonardo Van Dijl. At this edition of Cannes alone there are two films to bear their names as producers: 'Enzo' by Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo opened Directors Fortnight and, neatly enough, 'Adam's Sake' by Laura Wandel opened Critics' Week. More from IndieWire These Cannes 2025 Prize Winners Will Inspire Oscar Campaigns Cowboys vs. Accountants: The Real World of International Production Financing | Future of Filmmaking Summit at Cannes Earnest force-for-cinema credentials established, how does 'Young Mothers' fit into their body of work? Pivoting around a shelter for teenage mothers in the Belgian city of Liège, this modest offering does not deliver the immense emotional returns of 'Two Days, One Night' (2014) — arguably their last heavy-hitter. Nonetheless, there is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events. Jessica and Alba. Perla and Noa. Ariane and Lili. Julie and Mia. Each of the titular young mothers is a frightened child ill-equipped to handle the beloved bundle that now depends on them. The film's most immediate power stems from the casting of age-appropriate, largely unknown actresses, so that we have frequent cause to double-take at the sight of babies with babies. The shelter is depicted as a port in a storm where the girls participate in communal chores like cooking and cleaning and try to help each other out with childcare when they can. The grownup authorities are encouraging yet firm. Although the futures of Jessica, Perla, Ariane, Julie, are uncertain, this is a rare example of a positive institution showing up in a Dardennes flick. Each mother is dealing with non-existent or complex relationships with their families of origin. Bar Julie, who drew the long straw with her devoted Dylan, each mother is also dealing with an absent or checked-out baby daddy. Addiction, either personal or from their own caregivers, is a motif. Any sense of preparedness for the baby's arrival is notable by its absence as the characters spin out in spurts of productive energy, desperate to lay out the next track in the road in front of them. They want to bag a home or employment or a relationship to stop their new responsibility from feeling so totalizing and lonely. The curtain opens on a heavily pregnant Jessica (Babette Verbeek) as she rolls up to meet the mother who gave her up as a baby. It's a no show so caseworker Yasmine drives Jessica back home. Then we're with Noa (Lucie LaRuelle) as she picks up Perla's dad post release from a juvenile detention center. She's delighted to finally present as a family, whereas he is more animated by his first spliff in two months. The stress of it all causes Noa to collapse and Julie (Elsa Houben) helps to bring her back to her body with a massage. It won't be until later that we discover the demons that Julie is fighting. The most fully inhabited inter-generational microcosm comes courtesy of Ariane (Janaina Halloy Foken). Her pressures are packaged in a brilliant, ragged performance by Christelle Cornill as the mother that forced her not to have an abortion. Their scenes reveal that Ariane is sturdier than the precarious adult who has only recently shed a violent ex and is so obsessed with baby Lili that we fear for the vacuum she is contending with alone. Cornill is a volatile presence capable of delivering a backhander before falling to her knees in remorse. Halloy Foken (whose credits include 'Inexorable' by Fabrice Du Welz) holds her own as a focused teenager determined not to let her life be derailed by emotional blackmail close to home. The brothers do rigorous work in cutting between these four stories while letting them intersect as the girls warmly co-exist in the shelter. Essential character details emerge amidst the pace that drives their daily goals, and the fears bubbling underneath occasionally erupt, without anyone having to pay the price for this natural human upset. If there is an archetypal quality to each girl and if this is amplified by the stereotypical nature of their problems, there is enough tenderness in the atmosphere of the shelter to allow each actor to take their foot of the gas and relax into the small and soothing tasks that make up domesticity. A great deal of mastery is present in the balancing of disparate storylines and the blending of contrasting emotional landscapes. Individual insecurity is offset by release-valve relationships in a film that – like its young protagonist – is stronger than it looks. 'Young Mothers' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. 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