48th Hong Kong International Film Festival
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Favoriten (Austria, 2024)
- Ruth Beckermann, director and co-scriptwriter (with Elisabeth Manesse)
- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Documentary Competition program
In what can seem like another life now, I aspired to be an educator. Hence my often gravitating to books. TV shows and films with educational settings (including, to name just a few: To Serve Them All My Days; To Sir With Love; The Paper Chase; and Dead Poet's Society).
If given the choice though, I'd focus on secondary or tertiary rather than primary education. For, frankly, my sense is that the younger the child, the more difficult it is to deal with them! So I am inclined to take my hat off the most to primary school teachers -- and was left in awe of the one we see in Favoriten -- who is obviously adored by her young charges, all 25 of them, the majority of whom she teaches and communicates with in a language that's not their first language.
Ilkay Idiskut is a teacher in the largest elementary school in Vienna, Austria. Favoriten -- which takes its name from the working-class district in which the school is located -- documents the goings-on in her classroom over a period of three years as she guides her multi-cultural, co-ed class of students (many of them recent migrants and/or refugees from countries such as Turkey (where she herself originally hailed), Syria, Serbia, Romania and Ukraine) through the third to fifth grade of the Austrian school system.
Director Ruth Beckerman and cinematographer Johannes Hammel also follow Ilkay and her class on trips to a mosque (where a student proudly reveals that his father is an imam) and a Catholic church (where it is revealed that none of the students are of the Catholic faith). There are also scenes where the parents, with their children present, meet with Ilkay (where it comes to light that quite a few of the parents are themselves struggling with speaking German); and one where the school's head teacher holds a meeting with his staff (during which one gets the distinct sense that the school (system) is not as well-funded as should be the case).
In the main though, the focus in Favoriten is on the learning that takes place in the classroom; with Ilkay teaching the class about how to behave and treat one another as well as maths, German and other formal subjects. And while Ilkay is the main "character" in the film on account of her being the teacher in charge and primary adult in the documentary, the students quickly show that they may be diminuitive in size but quite a few of them have outsize personalities, and presences that have an effect on their surroundings and others around them!
At one point during filming, director Beckermann gave the children camera phones and had them film and conduct interviews of their classmates. This results in interesting footage and conversations. But the actual film crew also appear to have been successful in getting the children to act naturally in their presence too; resulting in Favoriten being a remarkably intimate collective portrait of a group of children whose struggles along with endeavor are honestly shown, and who have been helped along for three years by the presence in their life of an exemplary educator who truly cared for them.
My rating for this film: 7.0
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