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 Between the walls.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by François Bégaudeau, who also plays the main role in the film, Between the walls 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 Satan’s sun by Maurice Pialat, in 1987. For this film, Laurent Cantet also won the César for best adaptation in 2009. He was also nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film that same year.
But Laurent Cantet’s career cannot be summed up solely in Between the walls. He began his career as a director in the 1990s, first with the television film The Bloodthirsty (1998) before directing Human ressources with Jalil Lespert (2000)The timetable (2001) and To the south (2005).
After Between the walls, Laurent Cantet continued to film. He signs the feature film Foxfire in 2012, then the dramatic comedy Return to Ithaca in 2014. More recently, these are his latest films, The workshop (2017) with Marina Foïs on a writing workshop for a group of young people in integration, then Arthur Rambo (2021), inspired by the Mehdi Meklat affair, which is making headlines. Before his death, he was working on a project, The apprenticeplanned for 2025.