Politics & Society influenced Rosetta

The film changed Belgian law. After Rosetta, Belgium passed a youth employment measure that the press named the Rosetta Plan, which is about as direct as the relationship between a film and a social fact gets. Its subject is a seventeen-year-old living in a caravan with an alcoholic mother, fighting for a job that pays almost nothing, and the Dardennes film it as pursuit: handheld, close, no music, and no scene in which anyone explains her situation to her. The thing it is about is not poverty in general but the specific arithmetic of a trial contract, a waffle stand and a job that only exists if somebody else loses theirs, which is why the ending turns on Rosetta reporting a friend.