Émilie Dequenne (1981-2025)

Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne has passed away at the age of 43. She made her film debut in 1999, playing the leading role in Rosetta, for which she was awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes. In 2012, she won the same prize for À perdre la raison (Joachim Lafosse, 2012), and about ten years later, she also won a César for her role in Les choses qu'on dit, les choses qu'on fait (Emmanuel Mouret, 2020). She last appeared on screen in the Oscar-nominated Close (Lukas Dhont, 2022), before being diagnosed with a rare cancer in October 2023. Émilie Dequenne passed away on 16 March in a hospital in Villejuif, near Paris.

“I saw Rosetta three weeks ago, and haven’t recovered from it since. ... It moves me to the heart of my heart, this film about the necessity of life, the impossibility of morality, the soil of human experience. [A teaching colleague] told me that he couldn’t watch it because he thought too much about [Robert Bresson’s] Mouchette, but precisely, it’s at last Mouchette today, our Mouchette, the one we deserve, without any heaven and any transcendence. Her scream, ‘Mama! Y’a d’la boue! Y’a d’la boue!’ [‘Mama! It’s full of mud! It’s full of mud!’] haunts me, I can’t forget it, it’s exactly the despair of being in life without any pathos, any margin, just real life in the immediacy of the impulse.” 

Nicole Brenez1

• 1An e-mail by Nicole Brenez in: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2004), 67.