How do we learn
to live with others? Director Nicolas Philibert poses this
question in a village schoolhouse in Auvergne, where Georges Lopez teaches 13
children from age four to 12. Against a landscape of mountains
and farmland, from driving snow to rain to sun, the children gather in Lopez's
warm and colourful classroom, to read, write, cook, and sort things
out. At the end of the year they look ahead to the next, visiting the middle school and meeting
the little ones coming in the fall. As they learn sums and adjectives, with their teacher's help, they also learn to live side by side.
This is a heart-warming and heart-breakingly beautiful documentary.