Once in a Lifetime

At a lycée in Créteil, a history teacher proposes that one of the school's hardest classes enter a national competition on the Resistance and the Deportation. That year's subject is children and adolescents in the Nazi concentration camp system. The class resists first and then gets pulled in. The film is not interested in the teacher's self-sacrifice. It is interested in how a subject takes hold of a student: these teenagers start reading history not as homework but as an answer to their own questions about belonging. The form is confined to the classroom on purpose, and its strongest passage is the visit of a survivor who speaks to the class. The story is true. In 2009 Anne Anglès, a history and geography teacher at the Lycée Léon Blum in Créteil, prepared what was considered her weakest class for this competition, and the class won it. Ahmed Dramé, one of those students, co-wrote the screenplay and appears in the film. One of the pupils on screen is the person the story belongs to. Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar directed. Ariane Ascaride plays the teacher, and Noémie Merlant is in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like classroom films, teaching narratives about Holocaust memory, and true stories. Who it is not for: anyone who resists emotional steering. The film turns the music up for its finale and takes the audience exactly where it wants them.