Mar 30, 2012 By Chris Tinkham

In The Kid With a Bike, the latest film from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, an 11-year-old boy, Cyril (Thomas Doret), doggedly refuses to believe, after a month living in a state-run youth home, that his father has abandoned him permanently. The film germinated from the Dardennes’ initial premise a boy who is abandoned by his father and is saved by a woman. They have likened The Kid With a Bike to a fairy tale, but it wouldn’t be a Dardenne film if it weren’t grounded in socio-economic realities of today. More