Laurent Cantet
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“We Wanted To Show a Teacher with All His Weaknesses, Who Doesn’t Know Everything, Who Sometimes Makes Big Mistakes…”: Laurent Cantet on The Class
French director Laurent Cantet, whose films include Human Resources, Heading South, The Workshop and his Palme d’Or-winning The Class, died today at the age of 63. With this sad news we are reposting Brandon Harris’s interview with Cantet about The Class from our Spring, 2008 print edition. — Editor Starting with 1999’s Human Resources, Laurent Cantet has quickly built an international reputation as France’s most socially engaged narrative filmmaker, crafting films that highlight the ever lingering issues of race and class in both France and, as in the case of his 2006 film Heading South, its former colony of Haiti. With […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 25, 2024 -
“When I Write a Script, I Am Making a Hypothesis of What the Film Could Become”: Laurent Cantet on The Workshop
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop boasts a concept that in another picture might result in a piece of twisty, intellectualized metafiction: a semi-successful novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), teaches a writing workshop to a multi-racial group of young students in La Ciotat, a small town just south of Marseille. She encourages the students to explore the concept of genre — to conceive of a murder mystery — and to also connect to the working-class history of the place itself. One student, a young white teenager named Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), seems both engaged and roiled by the assignment; his cooly disturbing writings sit […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2018 -
Palm Frites: Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys
No matter the genre, you discover the imprimatur of the best classical Hollywood studio directors in all of their films—so posits the Auteur Theory. I accept the premise, with the proviso that it be applied, a bit differently, to the more distinctive non-Hollywood filmmakers, American or not. There’s a kernel of truth in the old saw that a director makes the same movie over and over. Robin Campillo is a French auteur, his work worthy of tracing a generic arc, even though he has directed only two films. In 2004, he made the profoundly disturbing low-budget horror flick They Came Back (Les […]
by Howard Feinstein on Feb 27, 2015 -
Social Studies
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Brandon Harris interviewed The Class co-writer-director Laurent Cantet for our Fall ’08 issue. The Class is nominated for Best Foreign Film. Starting with 1999’s Human Resources, Laurent Cantet has quickly built an international reputation as France’s most socially engaged narrative filmmaker, crafting films that highlight the ever lingering issues of race and class in both France and, as in the case of his 2006 film Heading South, its former colony of […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
NYFF46 PART 1
In Jamie Stuart‘s first episode in his series of shorts on the 46th New York Film Festival, he invites us into his wild imagination while sitting in on press conferences for directors Laurent Cantet and Kelly Reichardt. Download the short here by right clicking and choosing Save Target or Save Link. (33M) Approximate running time: 5:53. Please visit Jamie’s site at www.mutinycompany.com. To see all the videos in this series please go to https://filmmakermagazine.com/nyff46.php.
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 22, 2008
