Competition: “Lorna’s Silence” by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Palme d’Or laureates for Rosetta in 1999 and L’Enfant (The Child) in 2005, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to Festival Competition with Lorna’s Silence. The filmmaking brothers have also served as Presidents of the Cinéfondation and Short Films Juries (in 2000) and of the Caméra d’Or Jury in 2006. In their latest feature, they take another plunge into their hometown, Liège, Belgium, to explore the character of Lorna, a young Albanian woman drawn by love into a sordid plot. The predicament will quickly take on tragic proportions, and the weight of silence will become increasingly heavy to bear.

The Dardenne brothers recalled how they chose Arta Dobroshi, the leading actress: "One of our assistants went to Pristina, Skopje, and Tirana in order to audition about one hundred professional and non-professional young actresses. We selected Arta Dobroshi. We had seen her in two Albanian movies a few weeks before. We went to Sarajevo, where she lives, to meet her, and we filmed her with our DV camera for a whole day. We filmed her walking, running, singing, and also playing in scenes like those in our movie. Then she came over to Liege and we filmed her acting with Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione. She was amazingly beautiful and natural. In the evening, before she flew to Sarajevo, we told her that we had selected her for the role of Lorna and that she would have to come back to Belgium a few months before the shooting to rehearse and learn French."