Film Festivals

2019 Cannes Critics Panel: Day 8 – Dardenne Bros.’ Young Ahmed

Published on May 21, 2019

Palme d’Or winners for 1999’s Rosetta (review) and L’Enfant (2005), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have attempted to three-peat this past decade with 2011’s The Kid with a Bike (winner of the Grand Prix prize), 2014’s Two Days, One Night and 2016’s The Unknown Girl (review). Their eleventh feature film and eighth consecutive competition film, Le Jeune Ahmed adheres to their beginnings in cinema mixing non professional actors with socially conscious template and bleak realism. Set in Belgium, this is about a young fanatic barely out of childhood who plans to kill his teacher in the name of his religion. How can love of life win out over his desire to put someone to death?

A “lesser” Dardennes effort to say the least, it will likely not be a third Palme with this number. 16 of our 20 critics weighed in for an average of 2.3 on 5, well below their previous scores. Next up: Frankie.

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Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).