Young Ahmed

The Dardenne brothers' most argued-over film. Ahmed is thirteen, living in Belgium. He has recently come under the influence of an imam in his neighbourhood; he now refuses to take his teacher Inès's hand, will not accept his mother drinking, and believes he must kill his teacher because he considers her an apostate. He makes an attempt and is placed in a juvenile facility. The method is the Dardennes' usual one: the camera at the back of the boy's neck, no explanation, no interior voice, no music. We never hear what Ahmed thinks; we only see what he does. That choice is both the film's strength and what it was most criticised for. Some critics treated the total absence of his radicalisation as a hole, and accused the film of presenting a Muslim child as an unintelligible threat. Idir Ben Addi plays Ahmed, in his first film. It won Best Director at Cannes in 2019. An important work for anyone who values the Dardennes' cinema and its distant realism. Watching it without knowing the argument about its treatment of the subject means missing half of it.