Actor Roschdy Zem Reveals Foster Care Past and Childhood Struggles

Roschdy Zem had already recounted a part of his story in his film "Les Miens", released in 2022. But the one he confides to La Tribune and taken up by the magazine Ici Paris is more moving. The actor reveals that he was torn from his family and placed in a foster family in 1967, when he was only 18 months old. "I am the only one in my family to have been placed in a Flemish foster family," he confesses.

"We lived in the slums of Nanterre, without water, without electricity. The Catholic relief proposed to my parents to relieve them of a child for the time that their living conditions improved. And it fell on me. It was easier to place an 18-month-old baby than a 4-year-old child," details Roschdy Zem.

The actor of Moroccan origin thus spent more than five years in Belgium before rejoining the family cocoon. "As soon as my parents had access to social housing, in Drancy, I went back to live with my family. I was 8 years old and I had known a beginning of life before it." A difficult return for Roschdy who did not receive the same education as his two brothers and sister who saw him as a "foreigner".

"I was the only one not to speak French and Arabic, because my adoptive family spoke to me in Flemish and had educated me in the practicing Catholic culture." At school too, his results were not very good. "I was classified among the lost children for society. In hindsight, I realize that I was in total depression... My malaise manifested itself to the point of harming my body, to self-mutilation." Today, the actor has managed to heal the wounds of his childhood.