As his debut film Once Were Warriors showed, Lee Tamahori was a director of guts and flair

Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and s...

Laurent Cantet, film-maker who tackled diversity and class in France, dies aged 63

Director of Palme d’Or-winning film Entre les Murs (The Class) was much praised for humanism in projects

Laurent Cantet, the award-winning film-maker whose creations tackled some of the most complex issues of modern French society, including meritocracy, the education system, diversity and class struggle, has died aged 63 after an illness.

Cantet was best known outside France for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2008. It depicted life inside the classroom of a secondary school in Paris’s diverse 20th arrondissement and the relationship between students – compellingly improvised by non-professional teenagers – and their at times exasperated teacher.

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