The Child comes of age

Having to deal with one director when you are acting in a movie is enough for most actors and actresses - but Deborah Francois had two to cope with.

She said the prize-winning Dardenne brothers, who like to explore working-class life in their home country, were not always the easiest of people to deal with.

And just to make life even more difficult, when 18-year-old Deborah was taking the lead role in the brothers' latest film, L'Enfant (The Child), it was her first ever acting assignment.

She hopes it will be the first of many. In fact, she plans to 'live the life of an actress for all my life' and has just finished filming her second movie, titled The Page Turner.

"It was a big physical effort to make the film because the directors used to sometimes fight with me to make me live the character and to make her cry.

"In my second film, it was smoother. The director wasn?t so brusque with me. With the Dardennes, they were very specific [about what they wanted]," she said.

Before L'Enfant, Deborah's only acting experience had come from two hours of classes a week, but despite this she beat 200 other hopefuls to win the role of Sonia.

Sonia is a single mother who, just released from prison, decides to track down her child?s father, a petty thief who tries to sell the baby in an adoption scam.

The film - shown three times as part of Dubai International Film Festival - shows how bleak life can be in a Belgian industrial town and in doing so Deborah, a French-speaking Belgian, said it had a message that audiences from outside her home country could identify with.

"It's about poverty so it's very international - there are similar places in Britain. It's about the fact that there's no one to help young people," she said.

She said L'Enfant received a mixed response in Belgium when it was released earlier this year, with reactions varying depending upon how sympathetic people were to single mothers.

"Single mothers are quite common in Belgium so some people accepted the film as realistic, while others have difficulty talking about the subject," she said.

Although her career seems to be taking off, Deborah said prospects for her home country's film industry were not so upbeat.

"There are fewer and fewer people working in the movie industry and going to the cinema, but I think in France and Belgium we have people who are original. We don?t have the money of the United States, but we have ideas," she said.