Celebrity Biographies
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Simple but profound, the Belgians Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are part of the club of film director brothers, which has produced such illustrious figures as the Coens or the Taviani. Not only do they write, direct and produce all of their films together, but they also talk about themselves as ‘a person with four eyes’.
The eldest of the brothers is Jean-Pierre, who was born on April 21, 1951 in Engis. For his part, Luc came into the world on March 10, 1954, in Awirs. Both towns belong to the French-speaking province of Liège (Belgium) and are industrial areas where they grew up in contact with the humble class that they would later portray in their films. Initially, the brothers took different paths, as Jean-Pierre studied drama, while Luc opted for philosophy.
Both shared a passion for cinema. After meeting a professional director, Armad Gatti, and cinematographer Ned Burgess , they decide to go into the film business and found their own production company, Derives, which they later became Les Films du Fleuve. His debut feature was the documentary Le chant du rossignol , from 1978, about the resistance against the Nazis during World War II in Belgium.
Almost a decade later, they are shooting their first fiction feature, Falsh , about a Jewish family persecuted by the Nazis. It goes somewhat unnoticed, like Je pense à vous , his next work. However, The Promise (1996) , a harsh drama about immigration in Belgium, is a success, has international repercussions and wins awards such as the Golden Spike in Valladolid. In it we follow a teenager who helps his father by renting apartments to illegal immigrants.
The brothers’ hallmarks were already present from their early days: camera in hand, a style very close to documentary, a genre in which they took their first steps, social concerns and crude realism. In those years, a group of directors such as Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg had launched Dogma 95, a pact to shoot imposting a style very similar to the one that the Dardennes had naturally and spontaneously adopted.
With Rosetta , from 1999, they won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, as well as the award for best actress (Emilie Dequenne). She portrays the gritty drama of a fatherless young woman who lives with her alcoholic mother in a trailer and tries to earn a living from her.
After The Son , about a silent man who runs a carpentry workshop in a halfway house, the Dardennes achieve the feat of winning a second Palme d’Or at Cannes with the shocking The Child , about a marginal who has the wit to sell the child he has with his partner. Since then, the Belgians have been part of the very small group of filmmakers who have triumphed twice in the French competition, along with Alf Sjöberg , Francis Ford Coppola , Shohei Imamura , Bille August and Emir Kusturica .
Even so, they do not settle and go for the third. With Lorna’s silence (about an Albanian woman about to enter into a marriage of convenience) they received the award for best screenplay, and with The boy with the bicycle (in which an abandoned child sets off in search of his father) they won the Grand Prix. of the jury.