Cinema can so often be preoccupied with the extraordinary, so thank heavens for sensitive filmmaking siblings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who elevate the everyday and delve into desperation. The winner of Best Screenplay and the Prize Of The Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, the brothers’ latest is set in their native Belgium in and around a centre for young mothers and focuses on five women and girls.

Recovering addict Julie (Elsa Houben) is building a better future for her and her child with kind boyfriend Dylan (Jef Jacobs), while Perla (Lucie Laruelle) has had no such luck with her baby’s father, who has just been released from a juvenile facility and couldn’t care less. Heavily pregnant Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is trying to trace the mother who abandoned her, while Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan) is considering giving her own baby up. Naïma (Samia Hilmi), meanwhile, seems to be a success story for the centre.

The interrogatory camerawork gets right up close to the emotion of it all and the actresses couldn’t be more convincing. The women’s backgrounds are varied and yet this tremendously tender, judgement-free film conveys a strong sense that all of them are starting motherhood at a heartbreaking disadvantage and the support they receive is truly touching. There are glimpses of a welfare state working at its best in the patient professionals who act as mentors, as well as how the girls and their own mothers have fallen through societal cracks in order to have even got here.

Although the material and performances are powerful, it’s handled with exquisite subtlety, delivered in the brothers’ familiar naturalistic, documentary-aping style. Outside of soap operas, teenage mothers aren’t granted much screen time, but with Young Mothers, the Dardennes take us beyond the hand-wringing headlines for a compassionate, really quite remarkable portrait of the challenges these girls face and the family they find in each other.

Young Mothers is in cinemas now.