The concept of the film, about two runaway children, is deeply rooted in Ruggia's own childhood experiences. Like the young protagonists, Joseph (Vincent Rottiers) and Chloé (Adele Haenel), Ruggia was fatherless from the age of six and suffered a similar emotional disorientation caused by his family's constant movement from one place to another.

Les Diables focuses on the relationship of two children coping with the effect of their displacement. Abandoned by their mother and consigned to the care services' conveyor belt of foster homes, Joseph and his autistic sister Chloé run away to find "home". For Joseph, this is realised as a long lost idyll of security and the cure for his sister's autism, and for Chloé it's articulated by the mosaic houses that she symbolically pieces together, from shards of glass.

DID YOU KNOW?
	Ruggia was inspired to make films after discovering the work of the Turkish filmmaker and political activist, Yilmaz Güney.    Ruggia spent two years researching autism for Les Diables.

While the film exposes the failure of authority (impractical guidance by the psychiatric unit, juxtaposed with the physical brutality of the police), Les Diables more remarkably represents a poetic picture of neglect, made vivid by the children's central performances.

Adele Haenel is superb as an untamable force, while Vincent Rottiers, as the streetwise Joseph, illustrates their plight through desperate monologues driven by unsentimental determination.

Clare Norton-Smith

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