In 2002, Olivier Gourmet won Best Actor at Cannes for the Dardennes' Le Fils (The Son).

Their 2019 feature Young Ahmed won them the Best Director Award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

With La Promesse (The Promise) (1996), Rosetta (1999), Le Fils (The Son) (2002), and L'Enfant (The Child) (2005), the Dardennes' films show young people at the fringes of society – immigrants, the unemployed, the inhabitants of shelters.

The Dardennes were born and raised in Seraing in Liege, in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium.

These films covered such topics as Polish immigration, World War II resistance, a general strike in 1960.

[6][7] With Rosetta the Dardennes turned their focus to the burdens – philosophical, spiritual, psychological – of unemployment.

"[citation needed] Crimes and occupations again figure prominently in the Dardennes' fourth film, L'Enfant (The Child).

Jérémie Renier played Igor in La Promesse, Bruno in L'Enfant, Claudy in Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence), Guy in Le gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike), and Bryan's father in The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue).

Like Rosetta's Emilie Dequenne, Déborah François, the seventeen-year-old lead in L'Enfant, was appearing in her first film.

[citation needed] In 2009, they signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

[13] In 2014, their body of work was awarded the special prize of the 40th Anniversary of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

[14] In 2016, they released The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue), starring Adèle Haenel as a young doctor who lets the door buzzer of her small clinic go unanswered one evening after work hours and then grows determined to discover the identity of the young woman found dead nearby when the police see from a security tape that she had been the person ringing at the door.