Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 205: Thu Dec 9

La Promesse (Dardenne brothers, 1996): Genesis Cinema, 9pm


This 35mm  screening is part of Human Resources, a season of films exploring the depiction of work and labour on screen. The season is curated by Ryan Ninesling, an MA student in Film Studies, Programming, and Curation, in partnership with the National Film and Television School, Close-Up Film Centre, and the Genesis Cinema.

Chicago Reader review:

A powerful 1996 neorealist feature by the French Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne that follows the instinctive, makeshift moral progress of a 15-year-old boy named Igor (Jerome Renier), the son of a slum landlord who rents to recently arrived immigrants, some of them illegal. One tenant, from Burkina Faso, falls from a scaffold and makes a dying request to the boy to take care of his wife (Assita Ouedraogo) and infant son; Igor spends the remainder of the movie trying to honor that request, even when it means breaking away from his own father and coping with the scorn and incomprehension of the widow. This is a beautifully realized, richly detailed story, full of humor as well as pathos, and part of the Dardennes’ strength in telling it is their openness to experience and the world around them without being hampered by didacticism.
Jonathan Rosenbaum


Here (and above) is the trailer.

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