Laurent Cantet Dies: French Cannes Palme D’Or Winning Director Was 63
French director Laurent Cantet, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2008 for The Class, has died at the age of 63.
His agent Isabelle de la Patellière told news agency Agence France Presse that the filmmaker had died on Thursday morning of an illness.
Based on the semi-autobiographical book by writer François Bégaudeau about his experiences working as a literature teacher in an inner city school in Paris, The Class featured a mainly unprofessional cast including the author.
Cantet had been due to shoot his next film Enzo, with Elodie Bouchez and Pierfrancesco Favino in the cast, this August.
His second collaboration with Anatomy of a Fall producer Marie-Angle Luciani, after 2021 film Arthur Rambo, the drama revolved around a teenager who embarks on a mason apprenticeship in the South of France to escape a controlling father.
Cantet studied film at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris in the mid-1980s, where his contemporaries were Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand and Robin Campillo.
They would continue to collaborate on one another’s projects throughout their careers, most recently, with Campillo taking co-writing credits on Enzo.
Cantet first made waves with his debut feature film Human Resources (1999) starring Jalil Lespert as a management trainee. It won two César awards: best first film for Cantet and most promising actor for Lespert.
The director continued his focus on the world of work with the 2001 film Time Out, starring Aurélien Recoing as man who hides the fact he has been made redundant from his family.
Later highlights of his filmography include 7 Days in Havana (2011), the portmanteau film with six other directors including Gaspar Noé, Elia Suleiman and Julio Medem; his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), about a 1950s upstate New York girl gang, and The Workshop, a thriller set against the backdrop of a writing workshop in La Ciotat in the South of France.
