Rosetta

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1999, beating, among others, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother and David Lynch's The Straight Story. The seventeen-year-old Émilie Dequenne (making her screen debut) won Best Actress at the same festival, sharing the prize with Séverine Caneele for L'Humanité. The double win was the moment the Dardennes moved from respected Belgian documentarists to one of the most powerful forces in European arthouse cinema, a position they have held essentially uninterrupted for twenty-five years since.

The film also gave its name to la loi Rosetta, Belgian labour legislation passed in 2000 by the Verhofstadt government that obliged employers above a certain size to hire young workers, named directly after the film's depiction of teenage unemployment. It is one of the very few cases in European cinema of a film being formally referenced in the national legal record.

The Dardennes have since developed a remarkable tally at Cannes (two Palmes d'Or (the second for L'Enfant in 2005), a Grand Prix, a Best Director, a Best Screenplay and an honorary 75th-anniversary prize) making them, with Ken Loach and Michael Haneke, one of the festival's most consistent recurring directors. Rosetta is the foundational entry in that body of work and remains the film most frequently taught in introductory courses on the so-called Dardenne style.