French director Laurent Cantet poses on May 22, 2017 during a photocall for the film 'The Workshop' (L'Atelier) at the 70th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. © Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP
In memory of Laurent Cantet
It is with great sadness that the Festival de Cannes has learned of the death of the French director and screenwriter Laurent Cantet, whose consistent and humanist films depicted society with great sensitivity.
Starting with his first film, Ressources humaines (Human Resources) (2000), Cantet used the camera as a tool to analyse community and the way in which it shapes human relations in both the public and private spheres. L’Emploi du temps (Time Out) (2001), inspired by Jean-Claude Romand, and Vers le Sud (Heading South) (2005), about sex tourism, both co-written with Robin Campillo, bear witness to a destructive social pressure that causes the main character in the first film to conceal his real life and, in the second, to hide their lack of affection for others. In 2008, Cantet left a mark on the Croisette with Entre les murs (The Class), adapted with Robin Campillo from Laurent Bégaudeau’s novel. This feature film with its disconcerting naturalism portrays the relationship between a French teacher and his students in a difficult junior high school. Awarded the Palme d’or by a Jury presided over by the American actor Sean Penn, the film depicts an education system that struggles to carry out its teaching and social missions. After a detour to the US where he shot Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates novel, Cantet returned to Cannes at Un Certain Regard, first with the anthology film 7 Days in Havana (2012) and then with L’Atelier (The Workshop) (2017), which follows a troubled young man participating in a writing workshop. His final feature film continued this work on the dialectic between the individual and the group: Arthur Rambo describes the Mehdi Meklat affair, a young and successful novelist whose old tweets resurface.
Alongside Pascale Ferran and Cédric Klapisch, in 2015 he founded LaCinetek, a VOD platform with films presented by filmmakers who select their personal pantheon. An engaged artist, Cantet was a relentless humanist who sought out light in spite of social violence, and who found hope despite the harshness of reality.
The Festival emotionally acknowledges this discreet but essential filmmaker, one with a deep and abiding social conscience, who deeply believed in the power of cinema to bring about change.
