THERE IS SOMETHING iconic about the concept of a teenaged girl getting pregnant and being abandoned by her community. Tender of age, she’s alone to take the immense decisions which people much older and stronger than them cannot. Because of one mistake. This year’s  European Film Festival South Africa, in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, and online for free via the festival’s website, until 27 September 2026 features Young Mothers, created by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, a documentary-styled film about starting grown up life with a tiny baby in tow.

It follows the situation of several young women – Perla (Lucie Laruelle), Julie (Elsa Houben), Ariane (Janaïna Halloy), Jessica (Babette Verbeek) and Naïma (Samia Hilmi) – and their existence in a Belgian facility which is there to help them learn how to become mothers and grown ups in a world structurally and cardinally against them. In a world where their own inner demons are far from being completely formed; their own sadnesses, stubbornness and willfulness, their mood swings and recreational drugs are still very central in their personal crosshairs. These are individuals who form friendships with one another, but are ultimately alone with their bodies and their babies and their unforgiving relationships.

The film adopts the structure that many novels employ, to create a diversity of perspectives, where each chapter is written in the first person, by a different narrator. The value of this is that the context becomes implicit and it becomes one of the things that you collect as you immerse yourself in the complexities of the given character.  

But it is the tenderness and candour with which this film is made that will hold you to it. The characters are not the bold “pick-me” girls depicted in many a teen show about high school. They’re ordinary teens, with dirty hair, loose clothes and hormonal blemishes, who carry their lot with a heaviness that reaches beyond the pretty stereotypes you may recognise from films of the ilk of Juno of 2007, directed by Diablo Cody, which is light and sexy and funny as well as moving and scary. Young Mothers leans on the side of basic and human.

This is the deep howl of a person who gets herself embroiled in a vortex of bubbles of semi-digested milk, of high school responsibilities and the horror of having to move into a flat with a boy she is not grown up enough yet to know. It’s the visceral shock of having to tell your mother to get out of your life and stay there. It’s the blatant helplessness of being in the world where strangers do a knee-jerk judgement on you because of the shape of your abdomen, the lack of rings on your fourth finger and the youth of your face.

Unstructured narratively, this is a slice of life that will haunt you. More than about babies hatching their own babies, it’s an indictment of the human condition.

• Young Mothers is written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne and features a cast headed by Selma Alaoui, Claire Bodson, Laurent Caron, Hélène Cattelain, Christelle Cornil, Adrienne D’Anna, Günter Duret, Juliette Duret, Tijman Govaerts, India Hair, Janaina Halloy, Samia Hilmi, Elsa Houben, Jef Jacobs, Lucie Laruelle, Mathilde Legrand, Joely Mbundu, Dominique Swinnen, Babette Verbeek and Eva Zingaro. It is produced by Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd and Delphine Tomson and features creative input by Benoît Dervaux (cinematography), Marie-Hélène Dozo (editor), Igor Gabriel (production design) and Dorothée Guiraud (costumes). In French with English subtitles, it is part of the 13^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town, Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank, Johannesburg and New Noise Courtyard in Durban, as well as online via the festival’s website, until 27 September 2026.