Students Sandra (Esmeralda Ouertani, left) and Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) raise their hands in a high school classroom in a tough Parisian neighborhood in the film The Class. (Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics)

In the opening of the French film The Class, kids enter and fill a classroom. They are loud and abrasive, zipping between offensive and defensive, smart and stupid and highly sensitive. In other words, they could be 13-year-olds in any urban school anywhere. And yet, they are entirely of their time and place: 21st-century Paris — the new Old World — in the heavily immigrant 20th Arrondissement, the kind of neighbourhood that comes to the attention of most North Americans only when a riot breaks out.

'You are stigmatized when you’re young, especially when you are not white. People are afraid of you, afraid of this energy. But if you manage to harness that energy, you can make great things.'

-- Laurent Cantet, director of The Class

The Class won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at Cannes last year for its unromantic probing of the modern teacher-student relationship. The film is a formal experiment of sorts, a collaboration between director Laurent Cantet and a sloe-eyed literature teacher named François Bégaudeau.

In 2006, Bégaudeau published a novel called Between the Walls, which tells the story of a year in a Parisian classroom. After 10 years as a teacher — and gigs as a punk musician and a film critic for French Playboy — Bégaudeau added actor to his resume. In the film, he plays a junior high teacher named Francois, a variation on himself. Over several months, Bégaudeau interacted with a group of Parisian students — none of them actors — for three hours every Wednesday afternoon while Cantet recorded the proceedings on a cheap video camera. From those sessions a loose script emerged; The Class was shot over seven weeks during the summer of 2007.

Months in a small room filled with teens may be a nightmare to some, but Cantet describes the process of making the film as “funny.”

“We were all laughing all the time,” he tells me recently in a Toronto hotel room. Cantet is a composed, slightly distant man who speaks in an unwittingly poetic French accent. “Usually when I’m shooting, I’m really anxious. I always think I’m making the worst film in the history of cinema. But with this film, everything seemed obvious, easy. I wasn’t sure if it was a good film, but I knew the process was working.”

Cantet is the son of two schoolteachers, but he says that his motivation for making the film had less to do with his parents than with his kids. He has two teenagers in a public school in suburban Paris very similar to the one in the film, and he’s witnessed first hand the effect a group of boisterous teenagers has on those around them.

Director Laurent Cantet. (Mongrel Media)

“You are stigmatized when you’re young, especially when you are not white. People are afraid of you, afraid of this energy. But if you manage to harness that energy, you can make great things. We were able to work for six hours a day with these kids; they could really concentrate. We had great trust. The teachers [who appeared] in the film were very jealous that I could handle these kids,” says Cantet, smiling.

Just before shooting the Charlotte Rampling film Heading South (2005), Cantet conceived a script about a troubled African boy who may be expelled from school and sent back to Mali. When he later read Between the Walls, the director decided to meld the two projects, working with professionals and non-professionals in the same improvised, workshop style that he used on critically acclaimed films like Human Resources (1999) and Time Out(2002).

As in Bégaudeau’s book, The Class never ventures outside the school’s property lines. Rather than following a conventional story arc, Cantet captures a string of incidents, both miniscule (like teachers debating a new coffee machine) and metaphoric. French kids from central and north Africa butt heads over what soccer team to back in the Africa Cup of Nations. A new student reads aloud his personal essay, listing his likes (video games, music) and dislikes (“I hate visiting my brother in prison”). A Chinese-French boy risks deportation when his mother is arrested for being in the country illegally.

These small moments speak loudly to larger issues of integration and belonging, which are already the central struggles of adolescence. I ask Cantet if he was inspired to write the film after the civil unrest of 2005, when young Parisians, many of whom came from immigrant families, set fire to cars and rioted in some suburbs. Cantet bristles.

“The press is always speaking of what’s going wrong, but these are often exceptional cases,” he says. “I wanted to look at children more precisely, to show that if you really listen to what they say, you can understand all the problems society is facing. When [one of the students] says she is not proud to be French, she’s saying something we need to understand. These kids desire to be part of our community and they feel that the community doesn’t desire them.”

With its intensely focused, documentary feel, The Class is no noble teacher fantasy in the mode of Dead Poets Society or To Sir, with Love. When Francois rescues his students, the rescues are small and unnoted. He often has the respect of the kids, but he is not always adored, and the film’s climax hinges on the moment when he loses his cool in class and uses the word “skanks” to describe two girls.

Literature teacher Francois (Francois Begaudeau) speaks with students in The Class. (Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics)

“Francois and I did not want to create a perfect teacher. I often asked him to appear more out at sea as he teaches. Lots of teachers told me that being a teacher is like acting: You are always improvising. You can’t hesitate when someone is asking you a question. We all make mistakes. It was important to me to show this weakness, to feel the solitude and loneliness of a teacher in front of a class.”

Cantet finished the film two weeks before Cannes in May, and then watched with relief as the audience embraced it with cheers at the red carpet premiere. It is now on the shortlist for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a testament to Cantet’s conviction that the film is not only relevant to France. (That said, I can’t imagine a teacher’s lounge in Canada where staff meet for a midday drink to celebrate the new school year.) It is, he hopes, a glimpse of a world as relevant in Vancouver as Paris.

“School is not a sanctuary. It is always crossed by all the issues of the psyche. The kids who arrive have their own problems. The teachers have their own problems. You can’t take school out of society. If you look at a school, you look at society in its whole.”

The Class opens in Toronto on Jan. 16, in Montreal on Jan. 23 and in other Canadian cities on Jan. 30.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.