It’s been a wild ride for Arta Dobroshi. One minute she’s dodging Serbian hatchet-men on the streets of Pristina, running, literally, for her life; the next minute she’s on the red carpet in Cannes, in a little black number, and being battered by flashbulbs and hailed as an arthouse queen by two award-winning Belgian provocateurs, the Dardenne brothers. “It’s strange, but it feels very normal to me, like a natural progression, and not odd at all,” says the 28-year-old Dobroshi, about her star-making role in the latest Cannes prizewinner by the Dardennes, The Silence of Lorna.

Here the Kosovo-Albanian actress plays Lorna, a Balkan immigrant living in Liège and hopelessly entangled in a crooked marriage scam involving Russian mobsters, Belgian junkies and a homicidal twist. Typically, and even for those already familiar with the directors’ unforgiving oeuvre, it’s a punishing work, and bristling with a bracing social pessimism that’s matched only by Lorna’s own tragic disintegration — from wannabe entrepreneur to penniless victim in 105 painful minutes.

“I was Lorna in every scene, every day, from 6am all day long,” Dobroshi says, describing how, after three auditions, she got the role, was given a mere two weeks to learn French (Lorna speaks French to her Belgian junkie husband, played by Jérémie Renier), and then thrust into the production spotlight for five long months.

“I lived like Lorna, I started thinking like her, and dreaming like her,” she says. “I never met people, I stayed on my own, like Lorna, and at the end of every day’s shooting I went straight to my room — I didn’t drink, I didn’t socialise, nothing.”

The movie, she says, is the culmination of a career that began when she acted for the first time in a drama class in North Carolina at the age of 15. She had been sent there, as a year-long exchange student, by her desperate parents who were trying to shelter her from the sufferings of ethnic Albanians under Slobodan Milosevic’s repressive Serbian-controlled regime. However, despite being moved from North Carolina to Tirana to Norway, she eventually returned to Pristina and faced a country defined by state brutality, sporadic massacres and Kosovan retaliations.

She kept herself sane, and alive, she says, thanks to the promise of popular culture. “We lived two lives,” she explains. “One life was normal, where we went out with friends, had parties and watched the movies that the rest of the world was watching. The other life was one where you had to be careful not to get killed. It was two extremes, and we tried to look to this normal part and avoid the other. Yes, we went to protests and we ran from the police, but we also listened to U2 and went to rock concerts.”

During this time, from 1997 to 2002, she attended the Pristina Academy of Dramatic Art, and earned her stripes in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Almir Bukvic’s Aristotle in Baghdad. She also appeared in short films and some features, and recorded a song to commemorate the notorious massacre and mutilation of Albanians at Racak. “I was friends with the composer, and I’m not exactly Britney Spears,” she says. “But when he asked me to do it, I couldn’t say no.”

Dobroshi was in Sarajevo, performing in a downtown theatre, when the Dardennes’ casting agent came calling, but she is now based in Brussels, where she lives with her boyfriend, a Belgian cameraman. She says that she is under no pressure to rush out her follow-up movie to The Silence of Lorna.

“In the past I never accepted offers of soap operas or sitcoms,” she says. “Even though sometimes I was in a bad way, financially, I said, ‘No! I need to follow my dream, and follow what I have in my heart.’ It’s what got me here in the first place.”

The Silence of Lorna is out on November 28 2008

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