Apprendre

Thirty years after Recreations, the film that won her recognition, Claire Simon goes back to school – a primary school in Ivry-sur-Seine, an inner suburb of Paris that the children discover on a school outing as if it were a foreign country, so far yet so close. From class to class, the director’s camera, literally at a child’s level, captures a look, a concentrated face, a pout of disarray. The film is decidedly optimistic without being naïve (as shown by the scene when they meet the pupils from a highly elitist Parisian school, another world), showing an institution at work and children struggling with themselves and with this momentum towards the future: learning.