After winning no fewer than eight prizes, including two Palmes d'Or in 20 years, and nine appearances in the Cannes Film Festival in Competition, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne return with Young Mothers [+lee también:
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entrevista: Luc y Jean-Pierre Dardenne
ficha de la película], a new project that reshuffles the cards of their filmmaking, changing the narrative paradigm by daring to tell a choral story, multiplying experiments and once again focusing on how their characters struggle to exercise their free will in the face of the fatality of social reproduction.

Cineuropa: How did this new project come about?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: We started with a scenario about a 16-year-old girl who lives in a maternity home and feels nothing for her baby. We thought it would be a good idea to find out more about maternity homes. We went to one to find out more. We were struck by the atmosphere, the life and the fragility of life in this place. There was joy and light in the place. One day when we got home, we said to ourselves: "We who want to change the way we write and tell stories, why don't we take an interest in what's going on in this house?" That inevitably meant several characters, a big paradigm shift for us. It started from there. More of an intuition than a story.

You start from a place, then think about all the people in it, their embodiments. What has this multiplicity changed for you?
Luc Dardenne: A lot of things. How were we going to organise these multiple embodiments? And with each character, how were we going to define the moments, rarer of course, that would allow us to share a story that was complex, while at the same time making great ellipses within it? At the beginning, the film was called La Maison Maternelle (The Maternity Home). We thought everything would happen inside. As we worked on it, we said to ourselves: "Be careful not to get bogged down, to make something too constructed". So we chose to let ourselves be carried along by the individual stories. We were careful not to fall into a catalogue of all the facets of early motherhood. We also wanted to offer each of them a light at the end of the story. Fragile, but a light nonetheless. It was when we started to interweave the stories that we began to prune and build. The big question in writing, shooting and editing is how to find a character after abandoning him or her for several scenes. These were questions we'd never asked ourselves before!

You choose to leave out some very powerful moments, such as childbirth and a relapse into addiction, as if you were refusing to be spectacular.
J-PD: We leave Jessica, who has just given birth, and when we find her, we see her running, but we don't immediately see her child. We didn't want to show Julie doing drugs either. Between us, we have an expression, we say: “If we do that, we'll start telling stories”. And that's not what it's about.

Was it important, almost militant, to offer these young women some light, when they are all fighting against social conditioning?
J-PD: I wouldn't say militant, but there's a bit of that. Fiction offers us this possibility, in relation to reality. A possibility that we felt was worth exploring. To show hope, however fragile, even if we know that reality isn't always like that.

How did you go about creating the different characters, their issues and what brings them together?
LD: We know that most of these girls experience generational continuity, a destiny that repeats itself. And then there's the precariousness and poverty. What also unites them is their relationship with their mothers. We didn't want to repeat ourselves too much, even if their situations are similar. Above all, we didn't want to describe every possible situation.

J-PD: We were obsessed with how life and hope could prevail in spite of everything. In the end, the film was haunted by the 60-year history of the maternity house in which we shot, there were photos that reminded us of that. Above all, we wanted our film to be a living object.

What makes the film come alive are the babies and their inevitable spontaneity. How has this changed the way you work?
LD: We did a lot of rehearsals, as usual, especially as we had five actresses. The big difference for us was the babies. We rehearsed with dolls, but when the babies arrived, it inevitably changed things. Life burst into the picture. The priority was to hold the babies properly, but also to play with them, even if it meant changing or moving the lines. You had to invent. The babies were a documentary element in the shot, a permanent unknown. There were happy coincidences, moments of grace. For us, it changed two very important things. Firstly, we lost our taste for perfection. Before, we'd start all over again, just to shift the camera a little, to adjust a movement to the millimetre. But now, when things have gone well with a baby, we're happy and satisfied. The second thing was that we had the pleasure of shooting faster. There was a lot of energy on set. It's funny, because it was more the crew who were urging us to slow down, whereas we were happy with the idea of going faster.