Tori and Lokita, from writer/director brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, is a tragic narrative that looks at the refugee and immigration process through a pair of siblings. And Tori and Lokita are siblings in the ways that count, regardless of familiar blood.
The film opens on Lokita (played by Joely Mbundu) at an immigration meeting where she’s forced to prove that Tori (played by Pablo Schils) is her brother, and how she could recognize him if he was given to the orphanage at birth. He was granted papers in Belgium because he was a persecuted sorcerer child, so he was granted refugee status, but Lokita has to prove a sufficient connection to him to get papers of her own. As they press, her story changes, and if it wasn’t for the scene with her brother later, you’d think it’s just her anxiety (she has meds to help with that) and not because she’s actively spinning a tale. We never get the tale of how the two came into each other’s lives, but they have a clear connection that supersedes blood. And when Tori tells the person that just denied Lokita’s petition for papers that, “they tried to kill [Lokita] for protecting [him],” you have no reason to doubt his veracity. The weighing of what does and doesn’t constitute persecution is one of the things broken in the system.
There is a clear difference between the way Tori and Lokita move through the world, at first, I thought it was just because he was a child, and a boy, and she had protected a measure of his innocence, allowing him to have a level of childhood (even as he helps her drug run) in a kind of Life is Beautiful way. He is comfortable asking for the money they are owed for performing karaoke. He runs across streets illegally. He asks for bread AND a box for it. And she keeps him from knowing about Betim (played by Alban Ukaj) coercing her to perform oral sex on him for money Betim knows she desperately needs. All things a good sister would help ensure, but each of these acts is also connected to the fact that Lokita doesn’t have papers, and Tori does. Lokita needs to pay off the people that brought them to Belgium and send money home to her mother, and Betim is the one employing her under the table. It adds to why she’s hesitant to ask for things, why she follows the rules, and why, although she tried to say no to Betim’s sexual coercion, she relents quickly. Because she can’t lose the only means she has to continue to protect her brother, pay off her debts, and support her siblings and mother back home, while she waits for her papers.
Only the papers don’t come. And Betim offers her a chance for fake papers, but it involves having to go to a secret location for three months to grow the weed and not being able to contact anyone while there. She also won’t make any money during these three months to send home or pay off the people she owes. But if she has papers, she can get a real job that will get her out of owing everyone, away from Betim, and will keep her with Tori, so she accepts.
Only to realize that when they said no contact, they meant even with Tori. Something she wasn’t prepared for. But the pair are resourceful. They aren’t going to let the government of Belgium or Betim and his people keep them apart. Even for three months.
Spoilers ahead:
Unfortunately, this is not a happy story, their attempt to get ahead of the people that are taking advantage of their situation ends in tragedy with Lokita murdered. This a scathing commentary on a system that forced Lokita, and real people like her, to go down dangerous paths with dangerous people because they didn’t fit the perfect criteria for what a refugee was.
Tori and Lokita was an Official Selection – Out of Competition at the 44th Cairo International Film Festival after having its world premiere at Cannes where it won the Special 75th Anniversary Award.
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