The Belgian authorities are grilling Lokita, a young African woman, over the details of how she supposedly found her brother Tori in a West African orphanage when he was eight years old, despite not having seen him since he was a baby. She can’t answer because it is indeed a lie. The two children, biologically unrelated and actually from two different countries, met while traveling to Europe together and became firm friends. They work together by night at a nearby Italian restaurant. But the kids have been drawn reluctantly into the criminal underworld to pay debts and send desperately needed money back home.
"Our film tells the story of a friendship, a beautiful and intense friendship. It wasn’t until we imagined such a friendship as the core of our film that we felt that our two main characters, Lokita and Tori, were coming to life as unique human beings, that they were moving beyond the media-defined image of those young migrants known as ‘unaccompanied foreign minors’."
- Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne