The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Li?ge-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes' work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.

"Bruges-la-Morte" is the story of one man's obsession with his dead wife and his soul's struggle between an alluring young dancer - his late wife's double - and the beautiful, melancholy city of Bruges, whose moody atmosphere mirrors his mourning. This hallmark of Belgian symbolist literature, originally published in 1892 and first translated into English by Philip Mosley to great acclaim twenty years ago, is now back in print for the next generation of English readers to discover. With penetrating psychological force and richly metaphorical language, "Bruges-la-Morte" draws a haunting picture of love, grief, and murder in what has become a "dead city," severely Catholic and once proud. The source of the famous opera Die tote Stadt and endless inspiration for Belgian and French artists, this novella will enthrall readers with its dark portrait of fin-de-siecle Europe.