Biography

Laurent Cantet was born on April 11, 1961 in Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France. He was a writer and director, known for The Class (2008), Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001). He was married to Isabelle Coursin. He died on April 25, 2024 in Paris, France.

Graduated from France's most prestigious film school, IDHEC (renamed La fémis).

Graduated from L'IDHEC (La Fémis).

After initially working in television, he became assistant director to Marcel Ophuls for Veillées d'armes (1994), a documentary about the siege of Sarajevo.

His film The Class (2008) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

Laurent Cantet was a French director, cinematographer and screenwriter.

[2018 interview] I think we're going through a really precarious period in film production, and I very much fear that it's going to be a lot more difficult make my kind of cinema. If you make films that don't exactly announce themselves as surefire hits, you feel like you're walking a tightrope. There's less money overall, and more of it gets concentrated in the same few projects. In France, things are more difficult today than they were 10 years ago. A decade ago, Canal Plus would help finance a lot more productions. Moreover, there's been a recent inflation in terms of budgets and resources spent. I really don't want to partake in that trend. I don't want to take larger scale films in order to show my evolution as a director.