A great director is gone, he conquered the world of cinema with his social films.
At the age of 63, the acclaimed French director Laurent Kante died after an illness.
His works tackled some of the most complex issues of contemporary French society, including meritocracy, the education system, diversity and class struggle, DarricNews reported.
Kante was best known outside of France for his film Entre les Murs (“In the Classroom”), which won the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It describes life in a middle school classroom in the diverse 20th arrondissement of Paris and the relationship between students, played by teenage non-professional actors, and their sometimes exasperated teacher.
Based on an autobiographical novel about an idealistic young teacher who confronts a troubled class of underprivileged children, Kante cast the book’s author in the title role. It became one of the few Palme d’Or-winning films to sell more than 1 million tickets at the French box office in the last two decades.
“Serious, subtle, sharp, disturbing, funny and touching,” Le Monde wrote of the film, which won the prize at Cannes with a unanimous decision by the jury led by American actor Sean Penn. “In the Classroom” understood the subtle intellectual confrontations and conversations that take place behind the closed classroom door: failures and frustrations not only between teachers and students, but also between the strict education system and the unequal view of modern society for young people.
The film was praised by then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said the production portrayed the difficulty of the French education system as well as the brave efforts of teachers.
But Kante, who was described by Libération critic Didier Perron as a social film director in the vein of Ken Loach, told Le Croix that he declined an invitation to meet Sarkozy at the Elysee after the film’s release. “I didn’t want to go and be photographed with Sarkozy and I didn’t want to talk about diversity with someone who invented the Ministry of National Identity,” he said.
Kante was hailed by French critics for bringing a form of generosity and humanism to the subjects he tackled. They range from the brutal systems of management and status in the world of work shown in his film Human Resources to sex tourism in Haiti in the 1970s in the South
The Cannes Film Festival described him as “a fierce humanist who seeks light despite social violence and finds hope despite the harshness of reality.”
His other films include Time Out, inspired by the true story of a man who kills his parents, wife and children after pretending to be a successful doctor for two decades. It won two awards at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.
Kante returned to Cannes in 2017 with The Workshop, about a group of troubled young people attending a writing workshop near the southern city of Marseille. His latest work, Arthur Rimbaud, which premiered in 2021, explores how a reputation can be destroyed on social media.
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