French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose 2008 film Class He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008 and died on April 25 at the age of 63.

The acclaimed filmmaker was planning to shoot his next film enzo, co-written by Robin Campillo and produced by Anatomy of a fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani, later this year.

Cantet’s agent, Isabelle de la Patellière, confirmed to French media that the filmmaker “died this morning in Paris due to an illness.”

Class is a Paris documentary-drama based on a semi-autobiographical book by François Bégaudeau set in a French classroom about a teacher in a difficult Parisian neighborhood and starring a mostly unprofessional cast.

Cantet’s last film was Arturo Rambo, about a writer who gets in trouble for his inflammatory content on social media, which premiered at Toronto 2021. He was also behind Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang who played in Toronto 2012, and Return to Ithaca, which was selected for Venice and Toronto in 2014.

His death has come as a shock to the French film industry and tributes have begun to pour in for the beloved director. The former director of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, described Cantet as “an excellent, discreet filmmaker, full of humanity, who is not dazzled by his Palme d’Or” in a publication on X (Twitter), and added that “Laurent Cantet triumphed with precision and a sense of rhythm. in what is the most difficult thing in cinema: filming conversations, that is, life. “I have the greatest respect for him.”