In just ten years, screenwriter and director Thomas Lilti, 47, has established himself in France as the storyteller of the medical world. Not that of laboratories, great professors or improbable diagnoses on rare diseases, but rather the chronicler of an intimate and humble medicine, practiced by passionate professionals who are a little at the end of their rope, pressurized by an institution that is both distant and too demanding. After Hippocrates (2014), Country doctor (2016), First year (2018) and the series Hippocrates, created for Canal+ and whose third season is being filmed, here he is abandoning the stretchers for the school tables.
A serious profession, his fourth feature film, is the bittersweet chronicle of a year in the life of the teachers of a college in the Paris suburbs. There we find, in front of and behind the camera, a group of loyal actors and technicians: the actors Vincent Lacoste, François Cluzet or Louise Bourgoin, the producers Agnès Vallée and Emmanuel Barraux or the production designer Philippe van Herwijnen, all present for years. years. Others, like Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays a single mother teacher, are newcomers. On screen, the group effect is in full effect.
Benjamin (Vincent Lacoste), freshly graduated, discovers life in the teachers’ room, embodying Thomas Lilti’s original questioning about “these adult people who, basically, have never left school in their lives: they are still in a classroom, they have just changed places”. In front of him, students, one of whom is particularly difficult, test his preconceptions and his pedagogy. As a troubled and slightly depressed lead, Pierre (François Cluzet) is the dean. Sandrine (Louise Bourgoin) bores her students without realizing it, Fouad (William Lebghil) is the English teacher we all dreamed of having, Sofiane (Théo Navarro-Mussy, revealed in Hippocratesthe series, which here confirms his talent, both virile and good-natured), is the friendly sports teacher…
A real gang for ten years
“I’m not interested in talking about disgusting or unpleasant people,” explains Thomas Lilti. It’s a real “gang” that he has built around himself for a decade: he persists in bringing together these actors who, alongside him and with his faithful alliance of producers, distributors and technicians, create a generation. “Cinema is collective, and I think that being at the same moment in your experience, in your life, in your relationship to the world, helps you share things. This creates collective emulation. »
You have 61.4% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.