Laurent Cantet (; born 11 April 1961) is a French director, cinematographer and screenwriter. His film Entre les murs (The Class) won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. Biography Laurent Cantet was born in 1961 in the town of Melle, Deux-Sèvres in western France; his parents were schoolteachers. He went to university in Marseille to study photography, and then entered the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris where he graduated in 1986 His colleagues at IDHEC included Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand and Robin Campillo. After initially working in television, he became assistant director to Marcel Ophuls for Veillées d'armes (1994), a documentary about the siege of Sarajevo. He went on to make some short films, often in collaboration with colleagues from film school. In 1998 Cantet was one of several young directors invited to make films for the European TV company Arte to mark the forthcoming year 2000, and he completed the mid-length film Les Sanguinaires (1999), about a group of friends who travel to an uninhabited island to escape the millennial celebrations. His first feature film, with a screenplay written jointly with Gilles Marchand, was Ressources humaines (Human Resources, 1999) about a management trainee working in his father's factory. This achieved both critical and popular success, and it won two César awards. His next film L'Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) continued his interest in employment issues, drawing upon a real-life case about a professional man who concealed his redundancy from his family. The screenplay was written jointly with Robin Campillo, who also worked on several of Cantet's later films. Social and political issues took on a more international perspective in Vers le sud (Heading South, 2005) about sexual tourism in Haiti. In Entre les murs (The Class, 2008) Cantet made a film which blended fiction and documentary exploring the daily life of a class of students in a Parisian school. The cast was composed entirely of non-professionals, including the teacher on whose book the film was based. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. Subsequent projects have taken Cantet to Canada for Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012) and to Havana for Retour à Ithaque (Return to Ithaca, 2014), working in English and Spanish respectively. In France Cantet has demonstrated a long-standing concern for illegal migrant workers (the sans-papiers) and has supported a collective of French film-makers