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AFI FEST Review: 'Our Children' Is Strong, Distressing Portrait of a Woman on the Verge of a Murderous Breakdown

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Belgium's official Oscar entry “Our Children,” directed by Joachim Lafosse, is based on real events that took place in a Brussels suburb in 2007, where a woman systematically murdered her children with a kitchen knife. It spans six or seven years, starting from the happy honeymoon between schoolteacher Murielle (Émilie Dequenne) and Mounir (Tahar Rahim, "A Prophet"), through the birth of their four children and the increasingly strained tension in their marriage, to the killings. This isn’t a spoiler -- the film, told in flashback, begins with a shot of four small coffins being loaded into a plane’s cargo hold.