By Tania Ketenjian

If there is one thing nearly everyone in the modern Western world is familiar with, it's school. Who can forget the experiences of a first crush, or feeling we're not learning the way other students might be, the first time we flared up in class, or a teacher that had a huge effect on us. These are all fundamental and universal experiences and they are properly observed in the film The Class by Laurent Cantet. Winner of 2009's Palme d'Or at Cannes, The Class is a fiction film based on a real classroom in inner city Paris. Laurent Cantet had always wanted to make a film about junior high and wondered how he would do it. Then he fell upon François Bégaudeau's book Entre Les Murs which chronicled his own experiences as a school teacher. This inspired Cantet to make the film and cast Bégaudeau in a role he was familiar with, the teacher. The Class is both a reflection of what happens in the classroom and a microcosm of French society itself.