Laurent Cantet

Laurent Cantet ; 11 April 1961 – 25 April 2024) was a French director, cinematographer and screenwriter. His film Entre les murs (The Class) won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

Biography

Laurent Cantet was born in 1961 in the town of Melle, Deux-Sèvres in western France; his parents were schoolteachers.

He went to university in Marseille to study photography, and then entered the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris where he graduated in 1986. His colleagues at IDHEC included Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand and Robin Campillo.

After initially working in television, he became assistant director to Marcel Ophuls for Veillées d'armes (1994), a documentary about the siege of Sarajevo. He went on to make some short films, often in collaboration with colleagues from film school. In 1998 Cantet was one of several young directors invited to make films for the European TV company Arte to mark the forthcoming year 2000, and he completed the mid-length film Les Sanguinaires (1999), about a group of friends who travel to an uninhabited island to escape the millennial celebrations.

His first feature film, with a screenplay written jointly with Gilles Marchand, was Ressources humaines (Human Resources, 1999) about a management trainee working in his father's factory. This achieved both critical and popular success, and it won two César awards. His next film L'Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) continued his interest in employment issues, drawing upon a real-life case about a professional man who concealed his redundancy from his family. The screenplay was written jointly with Robin Campillo, who also worked on several of Cantet's later films. Social and political issues took on a more international perspective in Vers le sud (Heading South, 2005) about sexual tourism in Haiti. In Entre les murs (The Class, 2008) Cantet made a film which blended fiction and documentary exploring the daily life of a class of students in a Parisian school. The cast was composed entirely of non-professionals, including the teacher on whose book the film was based. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. Subsequent projects have taken Cantet to Canada for Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012) and to Havana for Retour à Ithaque (Return to Ithaca, 2014), working in English and Spanish respectively.

In France Cantet demonstrated a long-standing concern for illegal migrant workers (the sans-papiers) and supported a collective of French filmmakers (the Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-papiers) who have made a number of short films to bring wider attention to the risks faced by migrant workers. Another aspect of Cantet's interest in social issues is reflected in his preferred method for developing a film, particularly those which feature non-professional actors. He said that he likes to give a lot of attention and time to the casting, seeking people who will play not themselves but a role similar to their own in real life of which they have a natural understanding (e.g. a factory manager and a trade unionist in Ressources humaines, the pupils in Entre les murs), and then to involve his actors in developing not only their own characters but sometimes the script as well, in a process of workshops and rehearsals.

This method was used by Cantet for Entre les murs, and he returned to it in L'Atelier (The Workshop, 2017) in which he worked with a group of young people from La Ciotat on the Mediterranean coast, exploring their present-day problems in a former shipbuilding town which had been radically transformed since its industrial past. Their fictional project in the film shows them collaborating in a workshop to write a novel about their town and drawing on their own experiences to enrich it, mirroring aspects of Cantet's own method in making the film.

In December 2023, alongside 50 other filmmakers, Cantet signed an open letter published in Libération demanding a ceasefire and an end to the killing of civilians amid the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, and for a humanitarian corridor into Gaza to be established for humanitarian aid, and the release of hostages.

Cantet died in Paris on 25 April 2024, at the age of 63.