Year: 2024

Runtime: 118 minutes

Directed by: Ruth Beckermann

By Sarah Manvel

Director Ruth Beckermann struck gold with “Favoriten,” a delightful documentary about two and a half years in an elementary school classroom in Vienna. Watching the children grow up under the leadership of their teacher is a very simple concept but when it’s done with this much careful attention the results are wonderful.

In Austria a class of kids stays together, with the same teacher, all through their education, so the documentarians were able to film the same group, with only one addition, all the way through. Favoriten is a working-class part of Vienna, and the class featured in this documentary is from the largest elementary school in the city. Almost all the children are Muslims, either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, and do not speak German at home. For anyone who lives in a modern European city this level of diversity is not a surprise but because this setup is still considered unusual (for unpleasant reasons we all know) it’s rarely reflected in tales of city life. Well, that’s also because adults tend to self-segregate in a way kids in a public school cannot. Telling the stories of these newer Austrians is obviously a sharp political act, and no doubt the reason why all the families of the kids were happy for them to participate.

The children themselves are delightful, of course. The movie follows them through the entirety of second and third grade, as well as half of fourth grade before their teacher, Ilkay Idiskut, who is herself Turkish-Austrian, must go on maternity leave. At first the focus was on getting the kids used to the cameras — the shooting schedule involved filming in the classroom approximately one week a month — and they showed such keen interest in the technical aspects of the work the decision was made to buy them cheap (and internet-disabled) cameraphones to allow them to film themselves. This is used most notably when one of the kids, Melisa, simply cannot get her head around a math question and despite careful coaching is unable to understand it in time. It’s awful, but later Melisa had her cameraphone to tell her troubles to as she went home on her scooter. Then she held up the phone as she whizzed down a small hill in the park so we could see her world. I was not the only person who burst into tears.

It’s incredible how affecting it is to see these kids learn about the world around them, and how Ms Idiskut sometimes gently challenges some of the stories they’ve heard at home. She never goes against what the parents tell them, but she also stands up for women’s rights and how people need to assert themselves politely in a way which makes the kids consider. And while some of the kids are keen to push boundaries, and obviously there are plenty of squabbles, for the most part the children are friendly and good-natured. Not always, of course. In fourth grade the new girl, Liemar, only speaks Turkish on arrival and the others tease her so badly Ms Idiskut must give the entire class a scolding. This is our community and she belongs to it, she says. But there’s also a wonderful sequence where six of the kids, three girls and three boys, interviewed each other. The boys end up trying to define culture, which they eventually agree means something you do sometimes but only with your family or people from your country. I’ve certainly read dumber undergraduate papers. The girls discuss their future ambitions, and one says she’ll never get married because she’d rather experience adventures than care for a husband. This brought down the house.

The Austrian school system is under the same pressures as anywhere, with few resources to back the teacher up – no second-language assistance, no nurse, no psychologist. But when Ms Idiskut announces her pregnancy – which one of the boys figured out first – there’s an additional struggle to find another teacher to take on the class for the last half of the year. Also in Austria the kids are sorted into college track at the end of fifth grade, meaning these sparky teenies are shortly facing an exam which will, without exaggeration, determine their entire futures. (The movie was filmed from 2020 to 2023, meaning that decision has already happened.) And it all builds to a final sequence which should be worth a Nobel Prize for the kind, patient, thoughtful Ms Idiskut. At the very least she was at the screening I attended at the Berlinale and had obviously been crying when she came up on stage. (It’s not in the film, but to answer the urgent audience question, she had a beautiful baby boy.) 

A documentary this kind and thoughtful is, as with teaching this kind and thoughtful, indistinguishable from love, and audiences will undoubtedly fall in love with Favoriten. The elderly gentleman in the Berlinale audience who asked so desperately about the baby also said this movie brought back aspects of his own schooldays which had been long forgotten. He’s right, and this gift of empathy is “Favoriten’s” greatest achievement. By helping these kids share their world with us they have given us the chance to remember what our own childhood was like, and to inspire us to do our best to make sure things are better for them and the other kids like them. I’ll go so far as to say that if you don’t cry at the final shot of the class together you never were a child.