The Class

Laurent Cantet's The Class (French: Entre les murs) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2008, the first French film to take the prize since Under the Sun of Satan in 1987, twenty-one years earlier. The film is adapted from François Bégaudeau's 2006 autobiographical novel of the same name; Bégaudeau, a former French-language teacher in a 19th arrondissement Paris collège, plays the central role and co-wrote the screenplay with Cantet and Robin Campillo (the future director of BPM).

Almost the entire supporting cast is composed of actual middle-school students from the Collège Françoise-Dolto in Paris's 20th arrondissement, where the film was shot over the course of a real academic year. Cantet developed the production in close cooperation with the school's administration, with the students participating in workshop sessions for several months before shooting began. Cinematography is by Pierre Milon, working with three handheld digital cameras simultaneously to capture classroom dialogue from multiple angles in real time.

The film was chosen as France's submission for the 81st Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, although it lost to Yojiro Takita's Departures. Cantet has since worked principally on smaller-scale features; the workshop-realist methodology he developed for The Class has been imitated in later French productions. Bégaudeau himself has continued his parallel career as a novelist and essayist, and is now one of the more prolific French public-intellectual figures of his generation.