The plot centres around a pivotal exchange between the teacher and a recalcitrant student, Souleymane, where the wrong choice of words leads to a dramatic unravelling of the classroom's febrile peace. Situations range from a new student struggling to fit in to troublemakers refusing to pay attention, and it looks like some of them might not make it to the end of the academic year. However, education is not just about learning the very basics to get through life, but also about opening up horizons and giving you opportunities.

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. Set entirely in a secondary school in a working-class district of Paris, where most residents are first-generation immigrants to France born overseas, the film follows the year of a young teacher, François Marin, and the 25 pupils aged 14-15 years whom he takes for an hour each day for French lessons. I do not want to spoil any of the later developments, but will only say that the film doesn’t offer any easy solution or happy end. Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.Around 50 students turned up at first but many dropped out: the pupils who make up the class in the film are those who stayed the course. Teacher movies throughout the years have instructed us to expect some kind of inspirational, uplifting moment to occur before the credits roll, but The Class doesn't offer us that easy get-out; some students have learned nothing at all, and some have been lost forever. This insistence on showing things as they really are extended to the multicultural make-up of the class - for many of the teenage actors the film provided an opportunity for a positive portrayal of a neighbourhood more usually associated with the 2007 riots in the Paris suburbs.

There isn't really a point in talking about performances, save for the adults, who are nonetheless teachers in real life. 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.The way it would work is Laurent would give me a theme [for the scene] and then I would improvise the dialogue. The teacher comes to rely on seduction, pressure and sanction without avoiding personal confrontation with some of his pupils. Before that point, we simply observe the day-to-day interactions between Marin and his pupils, and in these scenes, The Class differentiates itself from almost every other school-based film we've seen by making one simple choice – it actually focuses on teaching. The trickiest member of the class is Souleymane (Franck Keita), a boy from Mali with family problems and a temper. One of the first scenes of the film sets the tone and highlights the tension in the classroom: as the students work on the imperfect tense in French, one question from a student leads François to talk about the imperfect subjunctive (for the linguists among you, in the sentence, “il fallait que je fusse ” / “I had to be”, “fusse” is the imperfect subjunctive form of the verb “être”).

François is relatively calm, humorous and approachable, but actually a stickler for good manners and with maybe too thin a skin. Mr Marin is played by François Bégaudeau, a man with no prior acting experience, and if he appears utterly comfortable and natural in the role, that's because he's the real-life teacher whose memoirs inspired Cantet to make this film. Then Laurent would say something like 'I want you to be more attentive', so I would do that and he would say 'Yes, like that, like what you just did'.

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. Education is a dialogue between equals, in which the professor is obligated to lower himself to the intellectual level of his students, "lower" not in the sense of superiority, but of capacity and experience. I had a friend who had a class with Esmeralda and said she was like a Duracell bunny - she never stops - but that can be good because it teaches you about human nature. The other, which received the coveted Palme d'Or (although Gomorra is a tad more riveting), is Laurent Cantet's The Class (the original French title translates as Between the Walls), which some described as the new Dead Poets Society for obvious reasons. When he chalks up examples of good and bad grammar on the blackboard, they ask pointedly why he uses Anglo-Saxon names such as "Bill" and not, say, "Rachid".