“What’s interesting is that the film is understandable by people from all over the world,” director Laurent Cantet says of his Palme d’Or-winninng film The Class, an examination of a Parisian high school teacher and his students. “It’s very funny to realize that when I go to Hong Kong or all over Europe and the States. The questions are even the same in Taipei, which would seem very different from our culture and our problems. A lot of teachers came up to me there and told me they had the same kind of class in their country.”

Such news is very gratifying to Cantet, since it justifies his rigorous methodology as a filmmaker. Like Human Resources, his breakthrough 1999 drama about generational conflict at an ailing factory, The Class is as much a study of a place as it is a piece of storytelling — and despite such documentary-like trappings as its hand-held camerawork, it is a very crafty example of the latter.

Developed over a period of three years, Cantet made the film in collaboration with his regular screenwriter Robin Campillo, the students and staff of Francoise Dolto Junior High in Paris’s 20th arrondissement and François Bégaudeau, the teacher and writer whose memoir Entre les Murs provided a starting point. Bégaudeau also plays the role of François, a progressive-minded teacher whose endeavours to engage with his students have both positive and negative effects during the course of one school year.

Matters of power dynamics, of racial and cultural differences, of pedagogical techniques and of the uses and misuses of language all come into play in Cantet’s briskly paced social study. Whereas The Class has been variously interpreted as a vindication and a condemnation of the French educational system (or those like it in other countries), the film succeeds because it is neither. What interests Cantet is how this system functions and how it influences the people within it.

“I am always interested in taking a system and looking at the way it works, and looking at how human beings can find a place in that system,” he says. “In all my films, I use the same construction, actually. There is a single man, sometimes one who is very alone, in front of a system and trying to find his way inside it. Often the main character is an idealist, a man who tries to find another way of living with the system. At the end, maybe because of my pessimistic point of view, the system is stronger than him and he has to accept he is just part of that world.”

As to why he became so interested in the world of the classroom, Cantet explains that it’s one of the few places where people of diverse cultural and social backgrounds are compelled to mix. “It’s the last time in their lives they will really share the lives of people who are very different from them,” he says.

Cantet was also curious about how his educational experience compared to that of his teenaged children. “I was a teenager quite long ago now,” says the 47-year-old filmmaker. “I was living in a small city, far away from Paris, and we didn’t have this kind of mix between backgrounds. We were all coming from the same milieu — we were all middle class and white. My children live in the suburbs of Paris and they go to classes which look like the one we show in the film. I think they are cleverer than I was as a result of that diversity.”

Yet that diversity also poses particular challenges to the educators in The Class. Cantet makes clear that one function of the teachers is to domesticate their young charges and to make them fit into prefab social roles, whatever their backgrounds. Despite his many admirable qualities, François still operates on behalf of that imperfect system. He also makes grave mistakes in his efforts to engage and inspire, though Cantet is sympathetic to his plight.

“Like all the teachers I met, he is always improvising, always trying to find the best answer for a situation,” Cantet says. “When you have 25 children in front of you, they won’t give you one minute to think of what to say. I think what you see in my film is different from what you see in the film Half Nelson [the 2006 film about a drug-addicted teacher]. Every time I saw that teacher in his classroom, I was sure the writer wanted to make him heroic — he is so perfect. Here, this teacher is making a lot of mistakes. But in fact, he is also taking risks. It’s very easy to make a lesson, to lecture children and write your lesson on the blackboard and have them copy it. François is trying to help them to think, which is always dangerous.”