Thanks for the memories!

Purely Joyful Movie!

best movie i've ever seen.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

We sometimes forget how hard it is for young children when they start their school life . It's daunting going to a new place every day , with other children and adults they have never met before. To Be and To Have is a delightful documentary that follows a rural school in France that has just the one teacher and 12 kids aged 4 -10 . I wasn't sure if there was going to be enough going on this movie to keep my concentration but couldn't have been more wrong.George Lopez is the name of the teacher and we see him in the last year before he retires. This is a man who quite clearly loves his job and adores the children he teaches. At first we see the sterner side of him when he has to tell a couple of the children off but it soon becomes clear that these children are extremely lucky to have a man like Georges Lopez as their first teacher.There are some lovely scenes but one will stay with me for a while, its when he is talking to a pupil who's father has cancer and it's hard not to well up when see how both pupil and teacher handle it. The final day of George Lopes 's career is also another very moving moment.This wont be everyone's cup of tea but i love foreign documentaries like this

This film manages to pull off an unusual double: it is both boring and hellish. It is very slow, and very little happens, and most that does happen happens several times. It is about dull people in a dull world, doing nothing of merit or novelty.So much for the boring aspect of it, now on to the hellish:- The job of a psychotherapist is to convince people that they need his help in the first place, and then to convince them if they come to him that they are being helped by him, even if he is (as statistics consistently reveal) not helping at all. Similarly, the job of the teacher in this documentary is to convince the viewer that he is a nice, patient, caring man. This way, he gets to come across well, and the film-makers have a hero.The teacher we see in this film and the film-makers behind the camera are presumably sadistic uncaring bastards. Several times in this film we see a scene in which the teacher has isolated one pupil from the rest, and sets him up in front of the unforgiving and ever-judging camera, and slowly pushes him and pushes him until eventually he cracks and bursts into tears. For those who enjoy child psychological torture porn, this is a feast. For others, imbued with some modicum of empathy and perception, this is hellish. I wanted step into the picture and rescue those poor children from his vile clutches. All the time, he is selling himself to the viewer and the child as kind and gentle, and all the time he is anything but. The film makers do not intervene. Instead, the camera is rock steady on its tripod, out-staring the children, and intimidating them. All the director has to do is wait, and he will get his golden moment of child tears.The children in this film are not bright, or at least, not the ones the editor has chosen to show us. Again, several times we see a child picked on and humiliated for the camera. One child counts to six, and then fails to say the next number, and the teacher asks him what they have been working on all morning. The boy is told the answer a few times, but still cannot repeat it. I think if I were four years old and had a film crew, a teacher, and the rest of my class all looking at me like that, I might too be intimidated into silence. At another point, a boy is pushed over and bursts into tears. He is four. When the film came out he would have been about five, when the DVD came out he would have been about six. He was sentenced to a childhood of being the one who was pushed over and burst into tears. A newspaper report says that since the film came out, nine of the eleven children featured have sued the film makers for compensation for trauma.There is another scene in which one boy is at home trying to do his maths homework and is having trouble. More and more members of his family step in to try to help, and the way the scene is cut strongly suggests that none of them can solve the one problem that the little boy has been set. I strongly suspect that the editor has made them look dimmer than they really were. We urban film-going intellectuals are treated to an opportunity to laugh at the stupid rustics. Okay, the boy is bit dim, and his family is a bit dim - I get it - but there is no need to rub anyone's face in it.The teacher is forever fishing for compliments, both from the pupils and the viewers. To watch this smug man go utterly unchallenged was near unbearable. No one questions his methods or his authority. The parents all seem to defer to him, and to the children he is all-knowing. The school actually has two teachers, but the second one is almost entirely ignored. We are invited to feel sorry that the man is retiring. I am disappointed that he wasn't sacked thirty years ago. That he has no children of his own and is apparently single is not investigated. There may be very good or very bad reasons for this.I say that the people who write in other reviews that the perpetually black-clad teacher is saintly, the school idyllic, and the film charming, have been successfully conned. That was clearly the intent of the film makers, and that they have succeeded with so many people is praise-worthy in terms of film-making technique, but utterly condemning in terms of morality.If you hated school, as very many (most, I suspect) people did, then this film is a disturbing reminder of the sheer hellishness of it all. It is reasonable to suspect that the people who chose to see a film about school days are a sample biased towards those who liked school and were blind to its dark side.I can recall one shot that I enjoyed: a small boy, looking quite content and able, driving a massive tractor on his family's farm.

This sensitive chronicle of a year in a one-room classroom shows us a teacher who is humane, infinitely patient, and totally devoted to his children. His enlightened philosophy and love are clearly evident as he prepares his (often charming, sometimes troubled) children to be adults. He knows many things about his students that nowadays only the rarest of teachers would know.The film shows us gorgeous shots of pastoral serenity, but most of all, it took me back to the childhood that I would have wished to have had (but of course did not have). I wish that Georges Lopez had been my teacher. I would have learned French just to have been allowed to have had him as my own teacher (even now!). Monsieur Lopez is an irresistible teacher! This documentary film has humour and beauty; it shows us spiritual pain, problem-solving, and deep emotional growth. I found Être et Avoir deeply satisfying film, both aesthetically and pedagogically. Even though I was already a teacher, I learned a great deal about how a truly great teacher educates students. I was humbled to see the fruits of enormous patience and wisdom.

This film , as I'm sure you know, is a documentary, everything was carefully plotted by the filmography and director so that the crew were unseen and didn't affect the natural movement of the class, this is very effective as it brings to us the true essence of this common style of teaching. The quick moving plot is impressive and without a doubt, this truly inspirational and heart warming tale will take all of us, even the most uninterested and make us re-think about what we are doing. This film, like many others by Philibert is intruding of place where we would not normally go, having seen this as part of my A-level course, i revisited it as i felt that it needed more attention to really see what is going on behind the picture. This film has changed a lot on how i see my education and is an amazing course of study for those interested in education, the french language or just foreign films in general.