In some of these, ordinary people play versions of themselves. In others, historical events are reconstructed with uncanny immediacy and fidelity. And there are still others that use highly refined tricks and techniques to strip away the veneer of artifice and immerse the viewer in the syncopated rhythms and rough textures of daily life. One festival selection that is indisputably and self-avowedly a documentary, Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” is also a cartoon, using animation to reconstruct nightmarish scenes of actual war as well as the dreams of some of the men who fought it.
The blurring of boundaries between performance and captured fact, or between fiction and whatever its opposite might be, characterizes this festival (which opens on Friday and concludes on Oct. 12) from start to finish. The opening slot, frequently reserved for a picture expected to infuse the high seriousness of the event with a touch of patron-pleasing, show business glamour, belongs to “The Class,” Laurent Cantet’s warm and gritty chronicle of a year in the life of a high school in a tough Paris neighborhood. The film arrives in New York with Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, as part of its pedigree. (Of the 28 entries in the New York festival, 18 were previously screened last May in Cannes.) It is at once the most formally daring and the most populist opening-night selection in many years.
The main character, a teacher named François, is played by François Bégaudeau, an actual teacher and the author of “Entre les Murs” (“Between the Walls”), the autobiographical novel on which Mr. Cantet based this movie. François’s pupils — young faces of the melting pot that France has, with some reluctance and anxiety, become — are played by nonprofessionals, which is to say by young people pretending to be some version of themselves.
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