Laurent Cantet, the director who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with “The Gang” has died – News

French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, Palme d’Or winner in 2008 for “ATurma”” and director of films shot in Cuba and Haiti, died on Thursday at the age of 63, his agent told France-Presse.

“He died this morning in Paris due to illness,” said Isabelle de la Patellière.

Author of nine feature films, Cantet was currently working on a new project, “L’apprenti”, scheduled for release in 2025.

In 2012, the filmmaker participated in a collective work, “7 Days in Havana”, together with six other colleagues, including Benicio del Toro. The production captured daily life in the Cuban capital over seven episodes.

Two years later he returned to Havana to film “Return to Ithaca”, a collective film about the memories of five friends after one of them returned from exile, with Isabel Santos and Jorge Perugorría in the cast.

“The Gang” takes place in a school in Paris and narrates, with a documentary perspective, the daily life of a French teacher who teaches rebellious teenagers in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris.

He would return to the theme with “O Workshop”, from 2017.

Other well-known films by Laurent Cantet are “Human Resources” (1999), about professional relationships in a French company, and “To the South”, set in Haiti and filmed in 2005 with Charlotte Rampling and Karen Young.

In “The Job of Time” (2001), he told the story of a fired man who invented a job at the UN, in Geneva, with lying to everyone around him becoming a full-time occupation.

His last film was “Arthur Rambo” (2021), about the career of a famous young writer who goes into decline when his former alter ego Arthur Rambo, who shared homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes, is exposed.

The Cannes Film Festival, whose 77th edition will begin on May 14, cited the filmmaker as a “fierce humanist, who sought light despite social violence, who found hope despite the harshness of reality.”

He was a director and screenwriter “whose coherent and humanistic work designs a sensitive cinema, on the surface and on the margins of society”, adds the statement.