Palme d’Or 2008 for his film Entre les Murs, filmmaker Laurent Cantet died Thursday April 25 at the age of 63, his producer confirmed to Le Monde. “He died this morning in Paris of illness,” his agent, Isabelle de la Patellière, told Agence France-Presse.
The 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 Resources); 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 (L’Emploi du temps, inspired by the Jean-Claude Romand affair); Mature Women Vacation in Haiti Paying Local Sex Workers (Southbound); chronicle of the life of a college which appears as a sounding board for national turbulence, raising questions of power, inequality of opportunities, social and cultural integration, undocumented immigrants (Entre les Murs). 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 discuss 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 (L’Atelier), or that of a young writer who publishes his first novel while we find his old homophobic and anti-Semitic comments on the internet (Arthur Rambo). The director was working on a film project, titled “The Apprentice”, which was due to be released in 2025.
More information to come.