In April 2009 a new film by Belgian director, Stijn Coninx was released entitled, Soeur Sourire. It stars the French actress, Cecile de France, who worked for three years to see the film produced.

While the film is more realistic than the 1966 MGM movie with Debbie Reynolds, it is still based on a fictionalized account of the life of Jeannine Deckers, so it still cannot be called a biographic film.

Another motivator behind the film being produced is a Belgian businessman named Luc Maddelein who wrote a fictionalized novel based Deckers' life. He claims to be the world's expert on Deckers and that is easy when one is in possesion of her photo albums and documents.

My first contact with Maddelein was in 2003 when he approached me wishing to co-author an English language biography on Soeur Sourire. Maddelein had Deckers' collection because he "borrowed" it from her manager, Jean Berlier. During this time Berlier died and Maddelein simply kept the woman's belongings.

No one was allowed access to them unless they wished to co-author a book with him and subscribe to his viewpoints. He wanted me to sign a contract before I could even see one page of her journals. Since I failed to see how he could legally make anyone sign contracts for items he had no right to own I declined. Maddelein restricting access to a public figures papers is the reason that there is only one English biography still, and that is the one I wrote with Florence Delaporte. She had the good fortune to browse the papers and photgraphs in Berlier's office for as researchers should be able to do.

So, when or if the new movie, Soeur Sourire, comes out in DVD you can watch it for yourself and judge. It makes an issue of their "romance" and while I have no doubt they loved each other, Deckers firmly denied being gay when she was alive and most likely would not appreciate the assumptions made in Maddelein's book and the film.