[2][3] His first feature film, with a screenplay written jointly with Gilles Marchand, was Ressources humaines (Human Resources, 1999) about a management trainee working in his father's factory.

His next film L'Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) continued his interest in employment issues, drawing upon a real-life case about a professional man who concealed his redundancy from his family.

Subsequent projects have taken Cantet to Canada for Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012) and to Havana for Retour à Ithaque (Return to Ithaca, 2014), working in English and Spanish respectively.

He said that he likes to give a lot of attention and time to the casting, seeking people who will play not themselves but a role similar to their own in real life of which they have a natural understanding (e.g. a factory manager and a trade unionist in Ressources humaines, the pupils in Entre les murs), and then to involve his actors in developing not only their own characters but sometimes the script as well, in a process of workshops and rehearsals.

[6] This method was used by Cantet for Entre les murs, and he returned to it in L'Atelier (The Workshop, 2017) in which he worked with a group of young people from La Ciotat on the Mediterranean coast, exploring their present-day problems in a former shipbuilding town which had been radically transformed since its industrial past.