For many, the Cannes Film Festival is suggestive of a slightly tacky glamour. The French have long taken le cinéma seriously, however, and for all the red-carpet posturing, the world’s most famous film festival is indubitably a celebration of an illustrious international art form.

Films both innovative and classical are premiered; issues of sociopolitical, ethical or spiritual import are prevalent. Director Thierry Frémaux and his programming team want you to have fun, but also to think …

Few film-makers represent the Cannes ethos better than Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and their offering this year, The Unknown Girl, was the Belgian brothers’ seventh feature in the main competition. (All but one of its predecessors won a major prize, and two – Rosetta and The Child – were awarded the coveted Palme d’Or.)

As writer/directors loyal to the realist tradition, the Dardennes in the mid/late 1990s developed a distinctively fleet, fluid, up-close-and-personal visual aesthetic subsequently much imitated; duplicated rather less fruitfully has been their light but effective touch in treating serious subject matter.

When these devout cinephiles – and admirers of the films of the profoundly Catholic Robert Bresson – first won international acclaim, their work was often analysed in quasi-religious terms. Nevertheless, though raised as Catholics, the Dardennes have repeatedly refuted any such readings, pointing out that most artists in the West are aware of – and to some degree influenced by – Christian themes and concerns.