French director Laurent Cantet has died at the age of 63. He won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 for the film "Entre les Murs".
French cinema loses one of its directors awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. Laurent Cantet died this Thursday, April 25, 2024 in the morning, in Paris, his agent announced. Aged 63, he died of an “illness” revealed Isabelle de La Patellière to AFP. He leaves behind around ten films, and is one of the recent directors to have won the coveted Palme d'Or, in 2008 for the film Entre les Murs.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by François Bégaudeau, who also plays the main role in the film, Entre les Murs told the daily life of a teacher at a Parisian college located in a priority education zone. It was then the first strictly French production to have won the Grail at Cannes since Under the Sun of Satan by Maurice Pialat, in 1987. For this film, Laurent Cantet also won the César for best adaptation in 2009. He also had was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film that same year.
But Laurent Cantet’s career cannot be summed up solely in Entre les Murs. He began his career as a director in the 1990s, first with the TV film Les Sanguinaires (1998) before directing Human Resources with Jalil Lespert (2000), L’emploi du temps (2001) and Vers le sud (2005). ).
After Entre les Murs, Laurent Cantet continued to tour. He signed the feature film Foxfire in 2012, then the dramatic comedy Return to Ithaca in 2014. More recently, these are his latest films, L'atelier (2017) with Marina Foïs about a writing workshop for a group of young people in insertion, then Arthur Rambo (2021), inspired by the Mehdi Meklat affair, which are making waves. Before his death, he was working on a project, The Apprentice, scheduled for release in 2025.
