Laurent Cantet, was the director of a cinema interwoven with commitment and reality, which did not deny hope and was capable of moving the public. Ill for some time, the French filmmaker passed away on Thursday 25 April at the age of 63.
He entered the world stage and the history of Cannes in 2008 with Entres les murs, The class. Presented in the last days of the festival, the film set within the walls of a classroom, halfway between documentary and fiction, had amazed the jury and its president, Sean Penn. It cost only two and a half million euros and had a French teacher at its centre Francois Bégaudeau, author of the novel of the same name. In one school year he recounted the relationship between the teacher and a Parisian class, students aged from 13 to fifteen, of different social and ethnic origins. The son of teachers, Laurent Cantet, screenwriter and director, was the heir to the culture of his parents, “people involved in a certain number of causes, in which secular and republican morality was very much embodied”.
Considering the Ken Loach French, he began his career by making a documentary A summer in Beyrouth in 1990. Then becoming the assistant of Marcel Ophüls For Veillées d’armes (1994), on the war in the former Yugoslavia. Then he shot two short films Tous à la manifwinner of the 1995 Jean Vigo Prize, e Jeux de plage. His first film that made him known to the general public, Human resources (1999), won numerous awards including the César for best first fiction work in 2001.
The Cannes Film Festival expressed its condolences for the passing of Cantet, “whose coherent and humanist work draws a sensitive cinema, on the skin and surface of society”, defining The class as a film “of disconcerting naturalism”.
The filmmaker wanted to describe the world and its complexity. Human resources it told the story of the generational clash between a worker father and his son who was promoted to human resources manager. The next one Full time (2001), was inspired by the true story of Jean-Claude Romandwho invents a job abroad and kills his family so as not to reveal his deception. Towards the southwith Charlotte Ramplingrecounted the holidays in Haiti of mature women who exchanged local young men willing to prostitute themselves.
The trailer for “Foxfire: Bad Girls”
In 2012 he directed Foxfire – Bad Girlsbased on the novel Bad Girls Of Joyce Carol Oates, about the exploits of a group of proto-feminist girls who, in the American province of the 1950s, take revenge for the humiliations suffered by men by founding the secret group Foxfire. The film was released in Italy with a ban on children under 14, which infuriated the director: “Does the censorship commission think that Italian teenagers have less capacity for discernment than their French, Belgian, Argentinian or Canadian peers? In none of these countries was the film censored.”
“Return to Havana”: Laurent Cantet talks about Cuba
In 2014 he won the Venice Days of Authors award with Return to Havana (Return to Ithaque), which tells the story of five friends gathered on a terrace in Havana who retrace their lives, inextricably linked to the history of Cuba. Among them there is also Amedeo, who returned to his homeland after 16 years of exile in Spain. In the space of one night the five, between drinking, laughing, dancing and bickering, recall the dreams and hopes of yesterday and the disillusions of today. The jury chaired by Diego Lerman justified the verdict as follows: “With a limited place and time, the director manages to create an emotional and complex story about how to face the secrets of the past”.
The French director was working on a film project, entitled The Apprenticewhich was supposed to be released in 2025.
