The Dardenne brothers at the 63rd Festival dei Popoli

Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will be the guests of honor at the 63rd edition of the Festival dei Popoli, the international documentary film festival, to be held Nov. 5-13 in Florence. The festival will dedicate a retrospective of their films to the two directors - scheduled to take place at La Compagnia and  Stensen cinemas - culminating with a masterclass and the national premiere screening of  "Tori and Lokita", which was presented in competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival and will be released in Italian theatres at the end of November, distributed by  Lucky Red.

"The Dardenne brothers - explains Festival dei Popoli artistic director Alessandro Stellino - have played a very important function in configuring what today is the language of  'cinema of the real' that is, the telling of the world realized by means of astrong adherence to the stylistic features of participatory documentary but at the same time elaborated in a dramaturgical sense, once again breaking down the frontiers between what we consider fiction and what is not.

It is therefore not only a matter of paying tribute to two undisputed masters of contemporary cinema but also of highlighting the way in which they were able to point to a new path without which documentary filmmaking as we know it today would not exist. Theirs is a cinema that is humanist but devoid of rhetoric, cruel and poetic at the same time, claiming the necessity of openness to the other and acceptance in a world increasingly oriented toward individualism and the closing of borders between people. Hosting them in Florence means paying them a more than fitting tribute and recognizing their role as revolutionary initiators."