The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liège-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes' work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.

让-皮埃尔和吕克-达顿兄弟因其情感强烈的现实主义电影而建立了国际声誉。他们从自己的家乡列日-塞拉宁（Liège-Seraing）--比利时南部法语区的前工业中心--获得灵感，精心制作了一系列虚构电影，将对社会边缘生活的敏锐观察与后现代时代的道德寓言结合起来。本书分析了兄弟俩的职业生涯，从70年代和80年代的左派视频纪录片，到80年代末和90年代初首次担任虚构电影导演，再到从《承诺》（1996年）到《骑车的孩子》（2011年）的六部主要作品，包括《罗塞塔》（1999年）和《孩子》（2005年）两部戛纳电影节金棕榈奖。本报告认为，达顿夫妇的作品的伦理层面补充而不是排除了他们对基本政治感的持续表达。