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Entre les murs (Collection Folio (Gallimard))

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Francois Marin (François Bégaudeau) is a French language and literature teacher at an inner-city Paris high school. The trickiest member of the class is Souleymane (Franck Keita), a boy from Mali with family problems and a temper. The superb camerawork is involving but never intrusive, allowing the audience to share a sense of intimacy with the onscreen events, while the supremely sharp editing keeps the film in constant motion. It was bizarre seeing my head so big," says Rachel Régulier, 17, who plays Khoumba, a tricky and complex student who emerges as one of the film's main characters.

It often comes across as a docu-drama: some classroom scenes are improvised and others are based on real-life incidents, so it has a very authentic feel overall. I think the film is about showing you that you can have arguments but, at the end of the school year, a class always finishes in harmony. Not surprisingly, when word of a cinematic adaptation came out, Bégaudeau wanted to be involved, contributing to the screenplay and taking on the lead role, virtually playing himself. Like the rest of the film, this scene is natural and unforced and effortlessly persuasive, but it is the non-dramatic sequences that I somehow found the most gripping. Its themes are universal, and the questions it provokes about cultural identity, discipline, and the way we teach and learn should resonate with any viewers who seek out this marvellous film.

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. The Class is a film with very little in the way of conventional action, but it's an exhilarating picture to watch nonetheless.

This story builds quietly, almost invisibly, through the film, and culminates in the disciplinary hearing in which Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother is present and in which the gloweringly silent and defiant pupil must translate her passionate and heartbreaking defence of him as a good boy. Actually, you didn't realise what you were doing - it was like a game," adds Louise Grinberg, 15, who appears in the movie under her own name, playing an intelligent yet shy member of the class. The film has received critical acclaim, achieving a 95% rating at Rotten Tomatoes out of 161 reviews counted, and an average rating of 8.Standouts include Esmeralda Ouertani as the quick-witted but obnoxious Esmeralda, who is unafraid of offering her opinion on Marin's teaching methods; Rachel Régulier as the sullen Khoumba, whose refusal to read an extract aloud threatens to undermine the teacher's authority; and Franck Keita, as the volatile Souleymane, whose fate is the key question in the film's second half.

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