Day 216: Être et Avoir

Soho Curzon is one of my favourite cinemas - a combination of location and more importantly, the best selection of films available. Narrative, cinematography, sometimes subtitles - and not a cartoon chipmunk to be seen.  Which is great, but only when I'm in Soho.  Today I discover that Curzon Cinemas have an on-demand service.  This is brilliant news.  I am saved from the dreary programming at Watford Vue. 

So I treat myself straightaway to 'Être et Avoir' - a documentary film shot in 2002, charting a year in a tiny school in rural Auvergne.  There's only one teacher, and a mixed class of ages from four to twelve.  The classroom is an ordered, safe place, where the children start to get to grips with the realities of life - concentration, disagreements, injustice, loss - all through small-scale dramas.  The stolen rubber.  The paint-covered hands.  The peer-critique of attempts at writing the number 7.

A beautifully-shot bubble-world, for the bargain price of two quid. 

The antithesis of those sugar-rush, attention deficit, action-crammed films.  And I don't have to sit next to someone eating a dustbin of popcorn.  Result.