Entre les murs (Collection Folio (Gallimard))

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Acting has always been my passion and it would give me great pleasure to succeed in it as a profession. Although it was developed as a fictional construct, perhaps the pupils of Cantet's class ended up learning more than they thought. This is because Cantet prepared the film by selecting thousands of real students for the various parts and then going through a year-long improvisation exercise with those who made it to the final cut. Then Laurent would say something like 'I want you to be more attentive', so I would do that and he would say 'Yes, like that, like what you just did'. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, two movies were able to give viewers a vivid glimpse of the very real social context they dealt with.

Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs is being released in English-speaking countries as The Class, but a more accurate translation of its French title is Between the Walls, and that would be a very appropriate appellation for this remarkable film. Cantet has used non-actors in his films before – notably in his excellent debut Human Resources – and he has a wonderful knack for capturing spontaneous moments, the moments that make the film feel so thrillingly alive.

At a teachers' conference to decide final placings, François defends Souleymane but his efforts are undermined by the two student representatives at the meeting, Esmeralda and Louise, who behave in a very childish manner. The way it would work is Laurent would give me a theme [for the scene] and then I would improvise the dialogue.

The plot centres around a pivotal exchange between the teacher and a recalcitrant student, Souleymane, where the wrong choice of words leads to a dramatic unravelling of the classroom's febrile peace. Remarkably, Bégaudeau plays himself, or a version of himself; he does it very well, although as teaching is all about putting on a performance commanding enough to subdue the toughest audiences, maybe that shouldn't surprise us. I love all the accidents that can happen and I spent some brilliant moments just listening to them, hearing what they were saying and then responding to that. Here, we have the true testimony of a person that realizes the weight of his social role as an educator (and, therefore, as a transmitter of values) and attempts to create awareness of such relevant worldwide issue through a novel and now a film.In fact, the drama of the film's second half is actually instigated by his lack of professionalism, when he finally loses his temper and recklessly hurls the word pétasses towards the two girls whose behaviour had been getting under his skin. It is a semi-autobiographical account of Bégaudeau's experiences as a literature teacher in an inner city middle school in Paris. And in a way, François does learn something: he learns that, however vaguely he intended to use the word, for his working-class teenage pupils, "skank" means "prostitute". But in recent weeks, as she leaves school at the end of the day, Esmeralda has been stopped by strangers in the street. The Class is based on an autobiographical novel by author and former teacher François Bégaudeau, about working at a tough multi-ethnic school in the Parisian banlieux.