Apprendre, Claire Simon up to the task of a child

Learning, raising your hand, not making a mistake. Wanting the teacher to say “that’s right!” Learning how to read, write and count isn’t always easy…
Teaching children, (…) encouraging them, helping them. Getting them reading, singing.
Teaching them to talk it out at recess rather than fight (…)

We remember 1993’s mid-length film Récréations, where Claire Simon was already filming games and disputes during recess at a kindergarten. This film laid bare, with an approach of great simplicity, the mechanisms and tensions of human behaviour, which children only exacerbate. In 2016, after a long period without having visited schools, she went behind the scenes of the prestigious La Fémis school with Le Concours (The Graduation) and filmed the joys and sorrows of those competing for admission.  She continued her panorama of the different stages of school life with a step backwards in Premières Solitudes (Young Solitude), where she filmed a high school in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-Sur-Seine.

“Filming reality means filming for the first time. It’s the childhood of cinema.” 

– Claire Simon 

Also shot in Ivry-Sur-Seine, at the Anton Makarenko elementary school, Apprendre follows the daily life of a classroom, as Nicolas Philibert did in 2002 in the cult film Être et avoir (To Be and to Have). With Apprendre, which completes her documentary saga of the school experience, Claire Simon depicts a reality that is less pessimistic than one has been led to believe and pays a lovely tribute to school teachers.