Laurent Cantet’s new film, The Class, provides a bracingly cliché-free corrective to the standard classroom drama, taking the viewer into a particularly lively classroom set in the tough, multiethnic Paris neighborhood of the 20th arrondissement for a full school year. Working mostly with nonprofessional actors playing the school’s students, teachers, counselors, principals and parents, Cantet (Time Out, SFIFF 2002) and collaborator/lead actor François Bégaudeau (adapting his acclaimed book about his teaching experiences in Paris) workshopped and improvised the drama over the course of a year. Much of the dialogue and many of the situations in The Class come directly from this lengthy creative process, creating an astonishingly rich slice of realism, by turns hilarious and harrowing. But though it has the feeling of a documentary, the film remains fiction, with the students playing characters far from their own experience, vividly and passionately portraying the dilemmas, contradictions and complexities of both teaching and learning. Unanimously voted the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival—the first French film to win the award in over 20 years—The Class is “utterly engrossing from start to finish,” says Geoff Andrew of Time Out London. “And the kids are terrific.”

Written by Laurent Cantet, François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo. Photographed by Pierre Milon, Catherine Pujol, Georgi Lazarevski. With François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita, Rachel Régulier, Wei Huang (128 min. Sony Pictures Classics).