While the films of acclaimed Belgian sibling filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“Two Days, One Night,” “The Son,” “Rosetta“) have generally glanced against social issues, their films have never been ripped from headlines. But it sounds like that’s about to change as the pair gear up their followup to this year’s “The Unknown Girl.”
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Attending the 20th Lima Film Festival where they’re being feted, the Dardennes revealed they are now working on a new film, which is aiming to shoot by the end of next year.
“We’re going to deal with a fanatical character, a character related to Islamist terrorism,” Luc Dardenne told Gulf News.
“For the past 20 years in Belgium we’ve had schools where people study Arabic through the Quran, we have Salafist mosques,” he added about the inspiration for the film. “They’re the ones that trained today’s youth, telling them, ‘On one side you have us, the true Muslims. On the other side, the Westerners, or the bad Muslims who are not the way they should be.’ That kind of education leads to what we have today.”
With terror attacks in both Belgium and France still lingering in the recent memory, you might think that the Dardennes might be making a reactionary picture, but they claim it’s an idea they’ve had for years now. Certainly, it sounds like it has the potential to stir the pot of controversy in a way that they haven’t quite done in their career to date, and it will be interesting to see how they apply their aesthetic and narrative approach to such a hot button subject.