The Workshop

Director Laurent Cantet’s Palme d’Or winning film The Class (2008), used documentary style and improvisation by its teenage cast to trace a teacher’s interactions with his working-class high school students. Centring on a writing class comprising working-class Black, Arab and white students led by a celebrated Parisian novelist, The Workshop starts out looking similar but soon reveals its differences.

 

Together with his classmates, a white teenager named Antoine – who watches right-wing videos about France’s ‘lost cultural identity’ in his free time – is tasked to collectively author a novel in the spirit of what unseen bureaucrats have dubbed ‘social integration’. While the class set about their projects, their liberal instructor Olivia is captivated by Antoine’s anxious and aggressive behaviour, and the increasingly violent depiction of racism in his prose. Set in La Ciotat, The Workshop follows lines of contemporary literary and political debate to examine the myths that bolster contemporary France, and the drivers of European nationalism.