The Kid with a Bike (2011) on Netflix
Cyril Catoul, twelve, lives in a children's home, left there by a father who does not want him. Samantha, a hairdresser, returns his bicycle and offers him weekends at her home.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.4/1029,642 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cyril Catoul is twelve and lives in a children's home in Liège. His father promised to be away only a month but does not answer his calls. Cyril breaks out and goes to his father's building, where a neighbor says the apartment is empty. The caretakers find him and take him to the empty apartment. He grabs hold of Samantha, a passing hairdresser. The next day she brings him his bicycle. Cyril asks her to take him in on weekends, and she agrees. Samantha lives with her partner Gilles.
Cast
- Samuel De Rijkas Educateur 2
- Carl Jadotas L'instituteur
- Claudy Delfosseas L'homme gare de bus
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Kid with a Bike (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Thomas Doret won the role of Cyril out of roughly 100 auditions: he was the fifth applicant the Dardenne brothers saw, and Jean-Pierre Dardenne said that when they met him, "it clicked right away".
- Music is unusual in a Dardenne brothers film: the pair hesitated for a long time before deciding it would serve the film's fairytale structure, with Luc Dardenne saying it could act like a "calming caress" for Cyril.
- In the earliest drafts of the screenplay, the character Samantha was written as a doctor, not the hairdresser she became in the finished film.
- While writing the screenplay, the Dardenne brothers aimed to avoid gloom and, according to Jean-Pierre, decided to omit any form of vulgarity from the teenage street criminals' language.
- The Grand Prix the film won at the Cannes Film Festival, the festival's second most prestigious award, was shared with the Turkish film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.
