The bright French filmmaker Laurent Cantet directed The Workshop (L’Atelier), which screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2017 Cannes Film Fest.
Olivia (Marina Fois), a well-known Parisian novelist, runs a writing workshop with a group of young people in La Ciotat, in the South of France. She is particularly intrigued by Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), a taciturn, not very sociable youngster.
When Antoine makes writing proposals that others consider to be strange and shocking, he becomes the “black sheep” of the group.
As a result, Olivia and Antoine seek escape from their daily lives by immersing themselves in an extreme right-wing ideology, and develop a relationship that is marked by conflicting forces of attraction and repulsion.