Le Fils
UN FIGLIO
Belgium, France, 2002, 103'
A carpenter, who teaches in a rehabilitation centre for youth just released from jail, is faced with Francis, a boy who stole a car radio some time earlier and accidentally killed his five-year-old son. Between the two – a sonless father and a fatherless son – grows a confrontational relationship that won’t be easily resolved. The film could become a hunt and instead is the expression of one’s searching in vain for an answer to Evil. With an even more extreme use of the shoulder-supported camera than in Rosetta to convey the carpenter’s quest, the film relies on the painful performance of Gourmet (a Cannes award-winner) who, with his opaque gaze, his body and nape dominating the shots, reveals the impossibility of unravelling the mystery inherent in all human beings. Wondering whether to believe or not in the boy’s repentance, on the edge between acceptance and forgiveness, the father goes through the great philosophical questions, identified in the Christological figure of the carpenter, and willing to walk through modern Stations of the Cross in the ending. The most Dostoyevskian film of the two directors, in which the image becomes pure form of the ethical questioning.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 09 Nov 2022
- Time: 10:00
Location
- Cinema Stensen - Viale Don Giovanni Minzoni, 25c, 50129 Florence
Organizer
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Jean-Pierre e Luc Dardenne
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are Belgian directors, screenwriters and producers. After studying drama, Jean-Pierre, and philosophy, Luc, the Dardenne brothers shot their first militant works, filming social struggles in Belgian working-class neighbourhoods. In the late 1970s, they founded film production companies and made their first documentary films, including Lorsque le bateau de Léon M. descendit la Meuse pour la première fois (1979), Pour que la guerre s'achève, les murs devaient s'écrouter (1980), R... ne répond plus (1981), Leçons d'une université volante (1982) and Regard Jonathan/Jean Louvet, 231 (1983). In 1996 their third fiction film, La Promesse, was presented at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, but it was not until 1999 that they gained international recognition with their first Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the film Rosetta. In 2005 they won their second Palme d'Or with L'Enfant - A Love Story and in 2008 The Silence of Lorna, dedicated to the theme of illegal immigration and white marriage, brought them the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Among their most recent works, The Kid with a Bike won the Special Jury Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and Tori and Lokita, Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2022.
