Palme d’Or 2008 for his film Between the wallsfilmmaker Laurent Cantet died Thursday April 25 at the age of 63, his producer confirmed to World. “He died this morning in Paris of illness”informed his agent, Isabelle de La Patellière, to Agence France-Presse.
A discreet director with an assumed social fiber, Laurent Cantet made Cannes history in 2008 by receiving the Palme d’Or for Between the walls, awarded by a jury chaired by Sean Penn. Half-documentary, half-fiction, this film with a budget of 2.4 million euros features a French teacher, François Bégaudeau (author of the eponymous novel on which it is inspired), and students aged 13 to 15 years old, with multiple geographical and social origins, in a Parisian college.
THE Cannes film festival immediately reacted, saluting the memory of a “fierce humanist, who sought light despite social violence, who found hope despite the harshness of reality”. A filmmaker and screenwriter “whose coherent and humanist work creates a sensitive cinema, on the surface of the skin and on the surface of society”adds the Festival, which describes Between the walls as a movie “with disconcerting naturalism”. “A fine filmmaker, discreet and full of humanity, in no way dazzled by his Palme d’Or, Laurent Cantet succeeded with precision and a sense of rhythm in what is most difficult in cinema: filming conversations, that is -say life »greeted the former president of the Cannes Festival, Gilles Jacob.
A film project for 2025
Son of teachers, Laurent Cantet was the heir to the culture of his parents, “people engaged in a certain number of causes, among whom secular and republican morality was very embodied”. Another family was formed during his studies at Idhec, the ancestor of Fémis, with a clan of comrades, to the point of founding with them a production company, Sérénade.
Intended according to him to describe the world and its complexity, the first four feature films by Laurent Cantet display great coherence. Confrontation between a worker father and his son promoted to HR at the time of the application of the 35-hour week in a factory (Human ressources) ; lies of a fired man who invents a job at the UN and murders his family so as not to have to reveal his imposture to them (The timetable, inspired by the Jean-Claude Romand affair); Mature women vacation in Haiti who pay local sex workers (To the south) ; chronicle of the life of a college which appears as a sounding board for national turbulence, raising questions of power, inequality of opportunity, social and cultural integration, undocumented immigrants (Between the walls). Each time it involves filming the work: workers/managers, business consultant/unemployed, sex work, teachers/students and the director’s office experienced like a Guantanamo.
Subsequently, he will tell the story of five young girls who form a gang to be able to fight against machismo and the control of men over women (Foxfire), that of a return to Havana after sixteen years of exile in Spain (Return to Ithaca), that of a well-known Parisian novelist who runs a writing workshop in La Ciotat with a group of young people in integration (The Workshop), or that of a young writer who publishes his first novel while his old homophobic and anti-Semitic comments appear on the Internet (Arthur Rambo). The director was working on a film project, titled The Apprenticewhich was due to be released in 2025.