To Be and to Have [DVD]

Amazon.com The National Society of Film Critics awarded Nicolas Philibert's lovely To Be and to Have a 2003 Best Documentary prize for its pastoral grace and subtle power. Philibert spent a period filming the rhythms and activities within a one-room schoolhouse in France's rural Auvergne region, where a soft-spoken teacher of 35 years, Georges Lopez, instructs pre-middle school children of varying ages in everything from reading to the making of crepes. The tall, mesmerizing Lopez, nearing retirement, is both a formidable and loving presence in his classroom, and the bucolic remoteness of his school has a way of amplifying such ordinary student dramas as fights, lagging grades, and painful shyness. Philibert gets a lot of mileage out of the antics of a loveable kid named Jojo, the decaying friendship of two older boys, and the grief of a young man whose father has cancer. A unique and moving experience. --Tom Keogh