Laurent Cantet

Based on a true story, Palme d’Or-winning director, Laurent Cantent (Entre les murs/THE CLASS, 2008) depicts the fall of a rising star, carried away by the turbulence of Twitter. Witness the rise and the fall of Karim D., the new wunderkind of French literature adored by critics and audiences alike, whose hate messages formerly posted on social networks by his digital alter-ego Arthur Rambo have been exhumed. Will Karim live with the consequences, or narrowly escape cancellation? “I am sharp and wise. I know poetry and politics. I rose from a social underworld to an exposed position as a provocative Parisian author. I published a novel. But I also write in 140 characters. And when I do, I hit my target. That’s why they all want me out!” -Arthur Rambo.Read More »

18 year old Eric, on vacation in the South with his parents, decides to escape the stifling situation especially with his 50 year old father, and join a group of fellow youth.Read More »

An unemployed man finds his life sinking more and more into trouble as he hides his situation from his family and friends.Read More »

Multi Cannes-award winning French film explores the depth of family ties as a young man is forced to fire his father. Franck (Jalil Lespert), a business student in Paris, returns to his hometown to do a year’s practical internship at the factory his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) has worked at for 30 years. He renews ties with his family and is welcomed back to their bosom. The rosy glow soon diminishes when it appears his position is in the Human Resources department – the division charged with forcing the workforce to accept a rather unsavoury proposal and resolve a brooding labour dispute. The dispute soon becomes personal with father on one side and son on the other. Also included is a short film by director Laurent Cantet – ‘Les Sanguinnaires’ – in which a group of friends decide to flee Paris to escape the global countdown to the new millennium. They exile themselves on a remote island but the world can’t be escaped that easily.Read More »

Set in the 1950s, a a group of young girls in upstate New York form their own gang.Read More »

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Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.

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Cannes Palmes d’Or winner ‘The Class’ follows a year in the lives of a class of junior high students who present a microcosm of society.

A fully sustained immersion in the academics, attitudes and frequent altercations of a group of junior high school students, “The Class” marks Laurent Cantet’s return to the sharply observed social dynamics and involving character drama that distinguished his 1999 debut, “Human Resources.” Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year, it will further cement Cantet’s sterling reputation among discerning arthouse auds in France and overseas.Read More »

REVIEW

Film festivals are by their nature notoriously cut off, isolated in such a manner they rarely function as the best place to fully appreciate or accurately evaluate the merit of new works. Laurent Cantet’s astonishing “L’emploi du temps” (“Time Out”) suffers from no such equivocation. It is a masterpiece, the best film shown in this strong festival.

Cantet’s debut feature “Human Resources,” distributed in the U.S. through the Shooting Gallery Film Series, was a marvel of political urgency, social verisimilitude and human conflict. Outlined with some of the same Oedipal struggles of that film, “Time Out” is a perfectly made, emotionally piercing and artistically accomplished examination of the desperation and despair of an essentially good and caring man driven to craven, absurd acts of self-delusion. With echoes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger,” the movie presents a terrifying and gripping portrait of a man so alarmed at what he has become that he invents an idealized portrait to cover up his faults and limitations.Read More »