Death of French director Laurent Cante at 63, Palme d’Or 2008 for Entre les Murs.

French director Laurent Cante, best known for winning the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, died this Thursday, April 25, at the age of 63.

The beginning of his career in the 80s

The son of teachers, Laurent Cantet earned a master’s degree in audiovisuals in Marseille, then joined IDHEC in 1984, where he befriended future directors such as Dominique Moll, Vincent Dietsch and Gilles Marchand. The latter hired him as cinematographer on his first short film L’Etendu (1987), and then resumed the collaboration in 1993 for another short film called Merry Christmas.

After graduating from the prestigious school in 1986 with a diploma film entitled “Chercheurs d’or”, Laurent Kante signed a documentary for television about the war in Lebanon (“Summer in Beirut”, 1990) before working as an assistant director at Veillées d’. Weapons (1994) Marcel Ophuls. He soon gained attention thanks to two short films in which he immediately touched on two of his favorite themes: class struggle in Tous à la manif (Prix Jean-Vigo 1995) and family ties in Jeux de plage (1995). which marks Jalil Lespert’s screen debut.

The first films made

After filming for Les Sanguinaires in 1999 as part of the “2000 Seen…” collection, Laurent Kante directed, again with the support of the Franco-German channel, his first feature film: Human Resources (1999). . A study of equal sophistication in the factory of social relations and father-son relations. Combining the power of documentary with melodrama, the film won two César awards: Best Debut Film and Best Young Actor for Jalil Lespert, the only professional actor in the midst of a group of amateurs. In 2010, director Courtney Hunt made an American remake of this film (Human Resources), produced by Alain Chabat.

Committed to the same subjects, Cante in his second feature film L’Emploi du temps deals with the issue of work. The film, awarded in Venice in 2001, is inspired by the story of the mythomaniac Jean-Claude Roman. With Vers le sud, his third opus, also presented at Mostra, the filmmaker confronts a distant country (Haiti) and a famous actress (Charlotte Rampling). In his own words, the film “compares the social misery of some to the sexual misery of others”, which for him is a new way of articulating the intimate and the political.

Palme d’Or in 2008

Next, Cante began filming Entre les Murs, a novel by François Bégoteau, in which the author reminisces about his daily life as a French teacher at a difficult college. From this documentary material, the filmmaker creates a nuanced and stimulating fiction about the school environment, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival – the first since Under the Sun of Satan (1987).

In 2012, he returned to the Croisette, collaborating with seven directors of different nationalities to stage the 7-day segment La Fuente in Havana, presented in Cannes Official Selection in the Un Certain Regard section. The director marked the beginning of the following year with the feminist Foxfire, based on the “Girl Gang Confessions” by American writer Joyce Carol Oates.

In 2014, Laurent Kante returned to Havana to return to Ithaca. The film tells the story of five friends coming together to get one of them back. In 2017, the director presented his new film at Cannes, L’Atelier, again in collaboration with Robin Campillo, in which Marina Foys steps into the shoes of an acclaimed novelist who supervises young people in a training workshop.

Four years later, in 2021, he released his latest feature film: the drama Arthur Rimbaud, in which a successful young writer finds himself in turmoil when old messages posted on his social networks resurface.

When he died on April 25, 2024, at the age of 63, the French filmmaker was working on another feature film project called The Apprentice, the future of which we do not yet know.