In the wake of Titanic back in 1997, a cinematic lifeboat managed to float my way from Europe: La Promesse (1996), by the Belgians Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. This film is about cultural clash and the moral enlightenment as well as emotional awakening that, under the right circumstances, can come of it. Ironically, the “right circumstances” are those of war and captivity – not literal phenomena in this case but figurative. This is not exactly a new subject – the attempt to reveal a human bond between characters who are otherwise military enemies, political opponents, religious rivals, or racial opposites – but it need not be one in the hands of sensitive writer-directors like the Dardennes, interested in something other than sentimentality, hyperbole, and oversimplification.

Measured though moving, La Promesse has a national origin that certainly didn't help its distribution prospects. What didn't help this film, either, is its title – The Promise, in English – which was the title as well of the German director Margarethe von Trotta's emotionally empty, politically clumsy, and melodramatically labored 1995 romance about the profound impact the Berlin Wall had on all of its German captives, East and West alike. La Promesse premiered in the United States at the 1996 New York Film Festival and was made by two brothers, then in their forties, who had spent most of their twenty-year filmmaking career collaborating on documentaries for European television.