Since at least the time of La Promesse/The Promise (1996), and without being political film-makers in the conventional sense, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have resolutely confronted the violences of the neoliberal order and sought to open up ethical routes out of them. In their previous incarnation as documentarians, the brothers worked to keep alive the memory of collective resistances to capitalism or Nazi occupation and the political traditions that accompanied them (Mai 2010: 1–24; O’Shaughnessy 2008). With their later fictions, recognising that these traditions had lost their power, they positioned themselves alongside characters who effectively found themselves alone in a struggle of all-against-all. In a situation of enforced acquisitive individualism and generalised precariousness, and with productive or even protected places rationed, life, their films suggested, had become a struggle to survive, to possess and to belong. One could either make oneself ruthless, as many of their characters do; refuse to fight, but at the cost of accepting one's own elimination; or discover some way to oppose the murderousness of the times. Within this broader context, the young, so often at the centre of the brothers’ films, find themselves in a particularly vulnerable position. With their elders either absent, absorbed in their own struggle for survival or actively destructive, they have no one to learn from about how to live productively in the world alongside others. Given the dramatically changed times, the brothers could no longer give their characters access to an elaborated leftist language or the institutional solidarities that would mediate between them and the socio-economic violences that surrounded them or allow them to stand back and map what was occurring. Instead, the characters were effectively immersed in situations, their interactions with others, their decision to kill or not kill, worked out directly in embodied encounters. At the same time, the brothers refused to give themselves or us access to a superior, distanced, spectatorial viewpoint. Instead, they placed their camera in close proximity to their characters, inviting us to follow them, scrutinise their gestures and their interaction with people and things, and track ethical resistances within them as they rise to the bodily surface and disrupt instrumental drives.