Movie review: Entre Les Murs [The Class]

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Cantet takes viewers into a year of François Bégaudeau's (French teacher and novelist) class, located in a "tough racially mixed inner city school."

The film uses improvisational cinéma-vérité style to try to convey the adolescent lives. Except two students and a parent, all students in the film were untrained children essentially playing themselves.
The magic of The Class is of course that it doesn't feel like a movie, but like something real, tangible - a slice of life, if you may. The students aren't acting, they're living, which is quite a nice breath of fresh air. Unfortunately the subtitles are poorly done, for it is impossible to translate the French slang most of the film is in. The film preaches nothing. It simply shows.

"You teach best what you most need to learn."
- Richard David Bach