Young Mothers is a 2025 drama film, written and directed by Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. It had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Screenplay prize and was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and received its UK theatrical release yesterday (29 August). So I went along to the Hyde Park Picturehouse in Leeds with very high expectations – and I was not disappointed.

The film is set in in a state-funded support facility for teenage single mothers in Liège, Belgium. It follows the stories of four girls: Perla (Lucie Laruelle), Jessica (Babette Verbeek), Julia (Elsa Houben), and Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan) and also touches on a fifth, Naima (Samia Hilmi) who is preparing to leave the facility. We watch them as they get to know their babies, whilst also attempting to come to terms with the harsh realities of their own lives.

The film includes drug dependency, mental illness, the lack of proper parental support, abortion and adoption. Bleak stuff, you might think, but in the deft hands of the Dardenne’s that is not the case – whilst it certainly pulls no punches, it is also light and hopeful and ultimately wonderfully uplifting. The girls are little more than children themselves, yet it is a joy to watch them learning to feed and change and bathe their babies in the hands of the caring, but down-to-earth, almost to the point of being strict, support staff. There are no easy answers – for every tentative step forward, there are snags and setbacks.

It is the simplicity and humanity in the storytelling which make the Dardenne films so powerful – they never tell us what to think – they just show us a situation and leave us to make up our own minds. This is perhaps a bit of a departure, in that it is an ensemble piece, rather than being focused on just one or two principal characters. I believe it stemmed from a visit the brothers made to a real home in Liège.

Every character is depicted honestly and with dignity; every scene is straightforward and unforced. The Dardennes do not create victims and heroes – they just show us real people doing their best, often in desperate situations. They have two Palme d’Or awards for Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005), which puts them into a very select group of nine directors – this could so easily have made them the only three-times winners.

Young Mothers is an extremely powerful piece of storytelling. Go along and see it – you will not be disappointed!