We started our second year in earnest with The Class, the French film that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival last year. Perhaps defined as the antithesis of Etre et avoir, it sparked an interesting discussion post-screening among viewers.

We wondered how the film was made and if director Laurent Cantet used ‘non-actors’. The film is based on a book by François Bégaudeau, who taught at a Parisian collège in the 19th arrondissement until only a few years ago. Some crucial scenes in the film are based on real events that happened in his classroom, like the ‘Are you gay?’ scene or when he treated some pupils as pétasses. After the book’s publication, Bégaudeau was approached by French film director Laurent Cantet when they both took part in the same radio show.

Cantet was keen to use only non-professional actors. Focusing on one Parisian secondary school, the Collège F. Dolto (conveniently chosen because one of the producers lived nearby), Cantet and Bégaudeau ran acting and improvisation classes for a full year, starting with fifty students and narrowing them down to twenty five. “We were far from what your hear about casting teenagers: ‘We saw 3000 kids and, all of a sudden, we found the pearl.’ No, we found some pearls more or less everywhere,”admits the director. Teachers in the film are teachers at Dolto in real life, the students’ parents are their real parents (with one exception, Souleymane’s mum), the school head is played by Dolto’s deputy head, etc. Why didn’t Cantet simply make a documentary film? “When you stand in front of a documentary filmmaker, you protect yourself,” he tells a blogger. “But here, the kids could be inside the characters, and that was a form of protection that allowed them to be more sincere (…) than they could be if they didn’t have the characters to play.”

If you are interested to read more, there is an interesting interview writer/actor Bégaudeau gave to the Guardian and, for the Francophones amongst you, the official website with some more interviews and a making of. But you have been warned: don’t use pétasse next time you cross the Channel.