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‘Favoriten’ Review: The Classroom Is a Community in a Lively, Poignant Primary-Education Doc
Austrian director Ruth Beckermann's "Favoriten" delivers a vibrant portrait of a Viennese grade-school class over the course of three years.
Instead, with Johannes Hammel’s warmly inquisitive hand-held camera pitched down at desk-level, we are in amongst the class from the beginning, observing interactions that occur with an often hilarious naturalism that makes it clear how quickly the children adapted to and absorbed the presence of the skeleton doc crew. It is also one way “Favoriten” — named, incidentally for the Vienna district in which the school is located — sets itself apart from Maria Speth’s “Mr Bachmann And His Class,” another expansive German-language documentary featuring a great teacher and the students he inspired. Watching them navigate difficult issues, under Ilkay’s sensitive guidance, especially those in which secular Austrian values come into conflict with aspects of religious orthodoxy is an illuminating privilege, and often a very funny one, as when a group of boys attempt with reckless and completely misplaced bravado to define the abstract concept of “culture” to each other.
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