Rosetta

Rosetta is seventeen, lives in a caravan park with her alcoholic mother, and wants one thing: a job. When she is let go she clings to the doorway, shouts, fights. Then she meets Riquet, who works a waffle stand; he is kind to her and invites her home. An option opens up in front of her: she could take Riquet's job. The film turns around that decision and never once judges her for it. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne directed. Émilie Dequenne plays Rosetta. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, a surprise decision from the jury chaired by David Cronenberg. Dequenne took the best actress prize. The film's name was attached to a Belgian law. The measure known as the Rosetta Law was a youth employment plan aimed at getting anyone leaving education into work within six months, and it passed in November 1999. The popular account is that the law was written after the film; the Dardennes corrected it. What Jean-Pierre told the Guardian was that the law already existed, it just had not been voted through yet. Who it is for: viewers who like social realism and stories followed relentlessly on a handheld camera. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a comfortable watch. The camera never leaves the back of Rosetta's neck and there is no music in the film.