Laurent Cantet
French film director, screenwriter and cinematographer (1961–2024)
Laurent Cantet ([lɔʁɑ̃ kɑ̃tɛ]; 11 April 1961 – 25 April 2024) was 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 peers 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.
The public source identifies “Laurent Cantet” as french film director, screenwriter and cinematographer (1961–2024). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Laurent, Cantet and French.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Laurent Cantet”, the useful work is to connect “french film director, screenwriter and cinematographer (1961–2024)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117071. VIAF identifies the subject as 56777112. The Library of Congress control number is nr2001008413. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 2024, 2008 and 1986.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Laurent Cantet”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Laurent Cantet primary sources, Laurent Cantet archive and Laurent research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Laurent Cantet”?
- How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
- Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Laurent Cantet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.