Touching immigrant drama in ‘Tori & Lokita’

Dardennes make a thrilling return to form

It’s one of the great ironies of cinema that many — not all, but many — of the most seemingly arthouse filmmakers make some of the most approachable films.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are imposing names in cinema. The Belgian brothers have twice won the Palme d’Or. But you would be hard pressed to find many filmmakers who have beaten a more humanistic path, trailing working-class protagonists with handheld cameras and deep wells of empathy. They’ve stuck resolutely near home, shooting in and around their native Seraing, often with unprofessional actors. Yet they’ve found global acclaim for their humble, neorealistic masterworks.

It’s been nearly a decade, though, since the Dardennes made a real impression. But in “Tori and Lokita,” a heart-wrenching immigrant drama that opened in theaters Friday, they make a thrilling return to form.

It’s about 11-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 16-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), two African immigrants living in an unnamed Belgian city. Only Tori has the necessary papers to stay, and immigration authorities are pressing Lokita. We’re plunged directly into her desperate situation, as she pleads to stone-faced bureaucrats that she and Tori and siblings. If proven — a DNA test is threatened — Lokita could stay. But their story isn’t convincing.

So tender is the connection between Tori and Lokita that you wonder initially if they are, in fact, brother and sister. But their bond is something more profound than blood, a product of shared circumstance and mutual perseverance. How they have gotten to Europe from Benin and Cameroon is never specified but it’s clear enough that they’ve been hardened by journeys that were solitary before they became intertwined. Lokita is still aggressively hounded for regular payments by the man who helped her flee. She sends home everything else to a family skeptical of how hard she’s working.

Yet Lokita’s doing everything she can, including delivering drugs for a backroom-dealing chef Betim (Alban Ukaj). He rarely misses a chance to take advantage of Lokita’s situation. Tori is there alongside her through nearly it all, sticking up for her to Betim, requesting their pay and soothing Lokita when she’s been abused. “You’re sweet, Tori,” she says. “There’s no one like you.”

The Dardennes’ movie, a prize-winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, resides overwhelmingly in their relationship, portrayed affectionately and unsentimentally by Mbundu and Schils. Tori and Lokita are welded together, a small but stubborn bulwark against a predatory world. When Lokita takes a job that separates them, the lengths to which Tori goes to reunite them is cleverly ingenious, deeply dangerous and one of the more moving things you’re likely to see in a movie this year.

Symbol

The Dardennes are at their best when their crushing contemporary worlds are navigated by young characters of gritty courage: the trailer-park teenager of “Rosetta,” the abandoned boy of “The Kid With a Bike.” “Tori and Lokita” also at point features another kid on a bike, making his way against the odds. It may be the abiding symbol of the directors’ films: In this world, survival is self-propelled. Their taut and straightforward films can be heartbreaking — and “Tori and Lokita,” which grows increasingly, almost unbearable tense is no exception. But in the bleak, everyday struggles the Dardennes dramatize, they are always, thank god, keenly on the lookout for grace.

“Tori and Lokita,” a Sideshow and Janus Films release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America but contains scenes of child peril and suggested sexual abuse. In French with subtitles. Running time: 88 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Also:

ASHFORD, Conn.: Amarey Brookshire was devastated when she heard about the fire at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill children - her camp.

The February 2021 blaze destroyed much of the retreat in the woods of eastern Connecticut, which was founded by the late actor Paul Newman in 1988 to give children with devastating medical conditions a place to, as he said, “raise a little hell.” The blaze burned the center of the camp, which had been made to look like an Old West town and housed the woodworking shop, the arts and crafts area, the camp store, and an educational kitchen. Fire investigators determined it was not arson but could not pinpoint a cause.

Amarey, now 13, said she was in the hospital when her mom told her the news.

“She told me that it was the arts and crafts and the wood shop area, so I was really sad because I love doing wood shop and like the arts and crafts,” she said. “I was really sad.”

Amarey, who has sickle cell disease, thought about friends she made at camp who were going through similar health struggles. She thought of the joy she felt catching her first fish, zip lining, swimming in a heated pool without worrying that cold water would trigger a health crisis, and the feeling of accomplishment after completing a box in the wood shop.

“We thought of how amazing that area of camp was, because when you walk in, you immediately feel life,” said Amarey’s mother, Amarilis Frajul. “Like when you’re in the wood shop area and you see all the marks on the tables, the holes from people before us. You go into arts and crafts, you see the paint, the glitter, the smell, and you know that it’s been used, you know, so many lives have been there. And to know that there have been so many memories created, and it was gone like that. That was hard.”

But the camp wasn’t closed. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and last summer, tents housed the creative center.

And money came pouring in, from 4,500 donors. The Travelers insurance company and the Travelers Championship golf tournament gave a combined gift of $1 million. The Newman’s Own Foundation donated an additional $1 million. And on Tuesday, the new $4.5 million, 11,000-square-foot (1,022-square-meter) creative complex opens. It’s a single building, made to look like several structures, with twice the space and an open-floor design. The wheelchair entrances are no longer separate, so nobody feels excluded.

And there are new amenities such as a quiet sensory room, a room with a fireplace for parents and caregivers to meet and talk, and a large deck for outdoor events. The facility now has geothermal heating and cooling, a large emergency storm shelter, and huge cisterns, so that if another fire breaks out, first responders won’t have to pump water from the camp’s pond. (AP)