After the Straight reached Laurent Cantet by telephone at a Toronto Hotel, it soon became clear why The Class, the director’s Palme d’Or–winning, Oscar-nominated feature, has created such a stir both in France and around the world. Even before winning the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize (the first French director to do so since Maurice Pialat struck gold with Sous le soleil de Satan in 1987), Cantet had already developed a reputation for integrity and courage. When filming Vers le sud—his cinematic adaptation of Dany Laferrií¨re’s tragicomic study of young black beach boys and rich older white women—the director insisted on shooting all the street scenes in the Haitian capital “because there is no city like Port-au-Prince”.

Similarly, when making L’Emploi du temps, the director assiduously eliminated the violent elements of the real-life source story.

“I’ve always been afraid of excessive things,” Cantet explained philosophically. “And cinema is afraid of the everyday. But the everyday is often very dramatic and filled with emotion.”

That is certainly true of The Class. Shot in a real Parisian high school in the 20th arrondissement, close to the famous immigrant neighbourhoods of Belleville and Ménilmontant, the film follows a year in the life of Franí§ois Bégaudeau (a teacher of 10 years standing who wrote the book on which the film was based and collaborated on the screenplay as well as playing himself) and his students as they try to learn from each other while using the controversial Freinet method.

When asked to explain what this was, Cantet hastened to insist, in his thoughtful French: “I’m no expert in the art of teaching. I just made a film about a particular school’s situation. As for the Freinet method itself, it tries to put the student at the centre of his or her own educational experience; it encourages students to think for themselves and reflect on what they’ve learned. It’s a very active process.”

As was the process of making The Class. When asked how he chose his brilliant cast of young actors, the filmmaker chuckled. “Paradoxically, they chose themselves. At the beginning of the school year, I organized a workshop of about 50 students. We’d meet every Wednesday, outside of school hours. About half of them eventually dropped out. Those who remained are the ones you see on the screen.”

The dialogue, which sounds entirely improvised, was largely written, although it changed radically as it passed through student mouths in subsequent takes. “I’d listen to what the students said,” Cantet elaborated, “then incorporate their speech rhythms into the script. The end result was halfway between classic screenwriting and improv class.”

The director would seem to be genetically prepared for this particular challenge, being the son of schoolteachers and the father of children the same age as the ones in The Class. “It was a chance to explore a world I didn’t really know,” he said. “It was also the chance to confront certain things that tend to get ignored in our society. That’s why so many teenagers went to see this film when they usually prefer blockbusters. It doesn’t stigmatize them; it sympathizes with them, exploring their universe and raising issues that really matter to them."