Home in Jeunes Mères

A short analysis of the concept ¨home¨ in Jeunes mères by the Dardenne brothers

Emma Mary Colazingari, Jian Jiang Giovanella, Nienke Wilhelmina Galama
Universiteit Utrecht
Transnational cinemas and literatures
12 May 2026

Introduction

The concept of “home” is often understood as more than simply a physical dwelling. Home is associated with emotional belonging, safety, identity, intimacy, and family relations (“Home, n.”). At the same time, home can also become unstable or temporary, especially in contexts marked by poverty, migration, precarity, or institutional control. In this paper, we explore the concept of home in a precarious context. Guido Kirsten argues that precarity is closely connected to feelings of insecurity, vulnerability, and dependence, all of which shape how domestic space is experienced in contemporary realist cinema (Kirsten 2022). In Jeunes Mères (2025), the Dardenne brothers demonstrate this instability by portraying a maternal shelter in Belgium that functions simultaneously as a place of care and a place of uncertainty. The meaning of home in the film becomes even more complex when examined through different linguistic and cultural traditions, particularly in Spanish, Italian, and French.

Key concept of home

In Spanish, the English word “house” is translated as “casa”, derived from the Latin “casa” which means hut or dwelling (“Casa,” Diccionario de la lengua española). The term refers primarily to the physical structure of a house: floors, walls and a roof. The English concept of “home”, however, could be best translated to Spanish as “hogar”. Unlike casa, hogar carries emotional and symbolic connotations connected to family life, intimacy, and belonging. The word derives from the Latin focus, meaning hearth or fireplace, emphasizing the domestic center around which communal life traditionally took place. The etymology of hogar therefore links home not simply to architecture, but to warmth, care, and shared existence (“Hogar,” Diccionario de la lengua española). 

Interestingly, in Italian there is no equivalent to the concept of home or hogar, so house and home are both translated as “casa”. “Casa” comes from the Latin casa which has the same meaning (“Casa,” Treccani). As a result, the Italian understanding of domestic space often merges the physical structure of the house with the emotional associations of home. The term casa can therefore refer simultaneously to architecture, family life, intimacy, and belonging.

Italian also contains related concepts that reveal different dimensions of domesticity. Similar to Spanish, the word “domicilio” derives from the Latin domicilium and refers to an official or legal residence (“Domicilio,” Treccani). Its etymological connection to domus again evokes the Roman household structure, in which the home functioned as both a family space and a site of hierarchy and authority. In this sense, the idea of home historically carried implications not only of protection and belonging, but also of control and dependence. ¨Duomo¨, the main church of a city or a cathedral, stems from the Latin domus Dei, meaning ¨house of God¨ (¨Duomo,¨ Treccani) and carries similar implications, considering that the Catholic church yielded great political and moral power in Europe during the Middle Ages. 

This duality becomes visible in Jeunes Mères. The maternal shelter provides the young women with domestic stability and institutional care, yet the space is simultaneously regulated and temporary. The residents do not fully control the conditions of their stay, making the shelter resemble a managed domicilio rather than a fully autonomous home. The concept of rifugio (refuge) is therefore equally important. Much like the Spanish refugio, the Italian rifugio suggests temporary shelter and protection rather than permanence (“Refugio,” Diccionario de la lengua española; “Rifugio,” Treccani). The film repeatedly emphasizes this instability, portraying home as something fragile and conditional rather than secure and permanent.

The French give their own twist to the concept of being at home: instead of having a specific word for home, the best equivalent is “chez […]”, for example “chez moi” (at “mine” – referring to “at my house”) or “chez toi” (at “yours” – referring to “at your house”). This concept is also used in many cafes, bars and restaurants, in an attempt to make a public dining area feel more personal or familiar. The idea of eating out at a restaurant called “Chez Albert” should give you the feeling that you are going to dine in Albert’s living room, that you are welcomed inside his home and will get to know him personally. 

In French, the word for “house” is maison, derived from the Latin mansio, meaning dwelling or place of staying (“Maison,” CNRTL). The term originally referred to a stopping place or residence, emphasizing habitation rather than emotional belonging. This etymology is particularly relevant to Jeunes Mères, since the Dardenne brothers originally considered the title Maison Maternelle (“Maternal House” or “Maternity Home”) (“Jeunes Mères,” Cineuropa). The title emphasizes the institutional and spatial dimensions of the shelter, presenting it as a place of temporary residence for vulnerable young mothers.

Context of the movie

Jeunes Mères is the latest film by Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, released in 2025 and selected for the Official Competition at Cannes. If you know the Dardennes’ work, this will feel like familiar territory, as they have spent decades making films about people living on the edges of Belgian society, such as undocumented migrants, unemployed young women and working-class families barely keeping it together. They have won the Palme d’Or twice, for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005, and their reputation rests on what Mosley describes as a “responsible realism”,  a filmmaking ethics that stays close to its subjects without sentimentalizing them (Mosley 2013). 

The film is set in a maternal support home near Liège. It is set in a residential shelter for teenage mothers  and follows five young women: Jessica, Perla, Julie, Ariane, and Naïma. Most of them are minors, most of them are single, and all of them are trying to figure out what comes next, for themselves and for their babies. The shelter gives them temporary housing, psychological support, and help with childcare, but it is not a permanent solution. At some point they will all have to leave back to a family home, into independent living, or in some cases without their child at all. That uncertainty hangs over the whole film.

The Dardennes have published their working notes from the making of the film, and they are genuinely interesting to read alongside it. They describe visiting the real maternal home near Liège during research and being struck by something they hadn’t expected, namely the gap between the communal surface of the place like  shared meals, group sessions, routines around the babies. And the very private, solitary inner lives of each young woman. That tension became the film’s structure. Rather than telling one story set against the backdrop of the shelter, they decided to follow five separate trajectories. As they put it, they wanted to make something that “while being a group portrait, is first and foremost five portraits of teenage mothers” (Dardenne, 2025). They were worried about the individual stories getting swallowed by the logic of the place, and you can see that concern reflected in how the film moves.  It keeps pulling away from the group and back into each person’s specific situation.

Formally, the film is typical Dardenne style with long takes, location shooting and no artificial lighting. They shot inside the actual shelter that inspired the film rather than building a set, partly because they felt the space itself needed to be real. Sinnerbrink notes that this kind of formal commitment, refusing to aestheticize or reconstruct , is central to the Dardennes’ ethical project, creating what he calls a cinema that implicates the viewer in the reality it shows (Sinnerbrink, 2012.) The five lead actresses rehearsed extensively, but the directors were careful not to over-direct them on set. They write about wanting to “let the wind through,” to preserve something spontaneous and unscripted in the performances (Dardenne, 2025.)

For the purposes of this entry on the concept home, Jeunes Mères is a useful and slightly uncomfortable example. The shelter is a home of sorts, since  it provides shelter, routine, and some degree of safety, but it is also heavily managed and explicitly temporary. Lancione’s work on precarious housing is helpful here: he argues that institutional spaces of shelter impose what he calls “forced temporalities” on their inhabitants, structuring time and movement in ways that residents cannot control (Lancione 2019). That captures something important about the maternal home in the film. The young women living there do not get to decide how long they stay, or under what conditions. Home, in this context, is not something you have; it is something that can be taken away, or that you have to prove you deserve.

Scene Analysis: Adoption and the Precarious Home

The concept of home as transitory and unstable for the precarious can be seen in the scenes that meaningfully focus on defining space. By separating different or adversarial characters through the cinematography and scenography, the dialogue is both dramatized and localized, thus confining the narrative tension to a particular symbolic space. What characterizes the Seraing localized to the characters can often be glimpsed through meaningful background, as a pair of succeeding scenes particularly exemplifies around the mid-point of the film.

In the scene after Ariane (played by Janaïna Halloy Fokan) lets a potential adoptive family hold her baby, she leaves the room and is confronted by her mother (1:04:53-1:06:39) over giving away the child. The two (alongside the care worker) are inserted in a profile shot, in which the heads are separated by the vertical mast of the doorway. The indoor space of the maternal home, where Ariane resides with the employee, acts as a home and care space throughout the film. This is visually contrasted to the mother inviting Ariane outdoors. However, the home in this scene also becomes a front for negotiation, materializing the film’s themes of reproductive labor and class inequality through adoption. Ariane’s condition for living in the mother’s home is being a young mother, a title she is stripping herself of in this scene. The concept of home, then, first becomes unstable inside the walls themselves: despite the assistance from a careworker, their care is conditional like the home itself. Ariane’s mother, who wants to keep the child despite Ariane’s class concerns, also represents instability through class by portraying the opposite function: keeping Ariane tied to a static cycle characterized by an abusive family structure. The separation between Ariane’s will and the mother’s wants already becomes visible through the door’s delimitation of the two profiles. When the pair share a scene outside (1:06:40-1:07:50), however, a frontal shot within the same brick background reveals how their generational struggles are more two sides of the same coin than opposites. The persisting issues of class inequality and family troubles are manifested in two differing ways. Ariane’s decision not to let her child grow up in poverty (as she did) emphasizes the role of reproductive labor in society, by giving her baby away to a higher class. In the previous scene, this also secures for the newborn a more stable family structure, as the adoptive family is shown to be empathetic towards her case. Ariane, then, represents reproductive labor as an invasive and personal consequence of precarity, which affects her own family but also guarantees her child a ‘safety net’. The shared background also mimics the dialogue, in which the mother urges Ariane to start fresh with a new, improved family structure founded on her newborn. The shot is no longer divided by anything, and they share the same perspective. If taken more literally, the background emulates the mother’s desire to reconstruct her family, to be bricks (ordinary) in the same wall (Seraing). The localized aspect of the film’s portrayal of Seraing, then, is seen through the everyday effects of reproductive labor on characters’ differing views of the home, and what family structures should inherit its walls.

The use of natural lighting and encouragement towards improvisation, as seen in both scenes, further promotes the realism preferred by the Dardenne brothers. Considering their close relationship to Seraing, this also constitutes an example of cinéma vérité as the natural shooting represents how the city is seen through their eyes. Furthermore, the lack of music in either scene (and almost all of the film) encourages the audience to concentrate on both dialogue and meaningful cinematography, particularly the background settings. The dramatic dialogue is thus filtered through realism to emerge as a portrait of broader inequality conveyed through everyday instances. In this way, the discussion over adoption in both scenes becomes an explicit confrontation of the bond between class struggles and reproductive labor. Overall, these themes are explored in the film through a tapestry of everyday instances that represent the overarching inequality (precarity) the mothers find in their localized precariousness. By employing realist techniques in shooting and scripting, the concept of home is explored through its unstable foundations (Ariane’s mother), temporary arrangements (the maternal home), and class-oriented displacement of family structures.

Conclusion

From the etymology of the Latin domus to the inequality and misfortune the mothers experience, the concept of the home has been traced with ambiguities that are spotlighted in the Dardenne brothers’ aforementioned ‘ethical project’. The film allowed for realism to deconstruct the foundations of the home, and explore characters beyond its boundaries. Echoing both the spatiality of the word maison and the importance of the background, the film ingrains temporality and tension into the characters’ everyday experiences through its realistic scenography and dialogue. In this way, the concept of home gradually becomes unfixed, represented through realistic depictions of the mothers’ precarious circumstances.

Bibliography

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