Belgium’s Dardenne brothers focus on terror in new film

Acclaimed Belgian filmmakers Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne will tell the story of an extremist “fanatic” linked to ISIS attacks in their next film, the latter said in an interview.

The brothers’ new film, to be shot next year, comes after their native Belgium was rocked by the March 22 airport and subway bombings in Brussels, igniting national debate over home-grown ISIS extremism and how to counter it.

But Luc Dardenne said the new project originated long before that.

“We’ve been thinking about it for years,” he told AFP in Peru, where he was being honored at the 20th edition of the Lima film festival. “We’re going to deal with a fanatical character, a character related to Islamist terrorism,” he said, declining to go into further detail.

Dardenne said both Belgium and neighboring France, which has also been hit by a string of ISIS attacks, were now immersed in “an unusual, uncommon war.”

“For the past 20 years in Belgium we've had schools where people study Arabic through the Koran, we have Salafist mosques," he said. "They’re the ones that trained today’s youth, telling them, 'On one side you have us, the true Muslims. On the other side, the Westerners, or the bad Muslims who are not the way they should be.

“That kind of education leads to what we have today.” The phenomenon, he said, is "Islam reacting to globalization."

“The Muslim religion, as a religion that organizes society, senses that that is finished, and they see it on the internet,” he said.