School of Babel

In a secondary school in the tenth arrondissement of Paris there is a welcome class for children newly arrived in France. Irish, Serbian, Brazilian, Tunisian, Chinese and Senegalese pupils between eleven and fifteen sit in it, and the one thing they all have to do is learn French. Julie Bertuccelli stayed inside that class for a year and recorded the talk, the quarrels, the laughter and the family histories that open up in lessons. The film shows migration not as a statistic or an issue but as how children sitting in the same room come to understand each other. It lectures nobody and keeps the teacher’s patience inside the frame as well. The eighty-nine-minute documentary came out in 2014 and went to many festivals, with a César nomination in France.