Etre et Avoir - To be and to have

● Director - Nicolas Philibert (2003)

● Philibert had set out to make a documentary about France’s changing agricultural

economy and the rash of family farm bankruptcies that threatened a very French

way of life.

● Philibert was keen to avoid an idealised portrait of the school “I didn’t want an

approach founded on the picturesque or on nostalgia but on the desire to follow

as closely as possible the work and progress of the children in a way that the

spectators can share their trials, their successes, their moments of

discouragement.”

● Shoot over 10 weeks (December 2000 - June 2001)

● “The film is very open, it gives everyone the possibility of projecting into it what

they wish, their own memories of childhood.” - Philibert

● “Before making the film, I believe that I had forgotten to what degree it is difficult

to learn but also to grow up. This dive back into school made me recall it with a

vengeance. It’s that, perhaps that is the true subject of the film.” - Philibert

● On the first day of the shoot, Philibert let the students examine the boom, the

camera, and other equipment, making everyone comfortable around these

strange new things.

● He and a small crew shot, without a script, a maximum of 40 minutes each day

so as not to overly disrupt the kids’ education.

● Suddenly, through the perspective of a van’s windshield, we are being sped

headlong through the twists and turns of a narrow country road to the gate of the

schoolhouse. Cut to the classroom, which is empty of souls except for the pet

tortoises slowly clacking their way around the floor. All the loud noise and fast

movement are left outside the door.

● “So I preferred to focus on the moments that illuminated the relationship between

M. Lopez and the children. Then in Julien’s house the television was always on,

but to film we had to turn it off.”

● When a film anticipates all questions”, Philibert said in a 2005 interview, “it

prevents us from thinking”. So, the director not only leaves his own questions

unanswered but also plenty of ours as well such as how the children will get on in

middle school etc.