WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary

Three weeks ago, at MIPTV, the international television market in France, I met Wigibert Moschal, a German sales agent. He first sneezed on me, then apologized for having a cold. As I had visions of spending the next two weeks with the flu, he handed me a DVD of a new documentary they were representing.

I watched it a week or so later. I knew nothing about it. It’s called Class Life. Subsequently, I found out it was directed by Hubertus Siegert.

The film starts slowly. We meet the students in the 5th grade of a Berlin school, one by one. Gradually we begin to see that they are a very diverse group. Some of the students are very bright. Others have severe learning difficulties. Memorization, doing homework is sometimes a struggle. As we identify and get to know something about these kids—Luca, Marwin, Dennis, Johanna, Christian, and their teachers—we begin to see the imperfect, incomplete, and tenuous universe that the learning environment is, and then, like a miraculous opening, realize that we are watching something which is a daring and brilliant educational experiment.

The mixture of students with such divergent learning abilities is intentional. Each student, no matter what his or her abilities, is pushed and expected to do their best. This sometimes leads to one of the kids having to deal with the emotional trauma of falling behind or short of their teachers or their own expectations. But a second factor is also at work. The students are grouped together in teams of two, and one student is made responsible for another. It is an ingenious concept, and by the end of the film, we realize that all of the students are pulling together for one cause: THEY WANT TO LEARN.

Class Life, the film, is not a pedagogic recording of an educational or social experiment. It is riveting as it gives us an unprecedented and often astonishing insight into the learning process and into the emotions and psychology of the students and their personal struggles. All of this is ultimately moving, most of all when one girl student returns to the class after a long absence. She has been ill with a degenerative lung disease and spent six weeks in a hospital. She can no longer speak, and barely moves her hand. We know, as the other kids in the class do, that she will probably die.

But the class, individually and without a false emotional note, gathers around her, becomes her fan club and support team, composes a song for her, and in the closing scene, takes her down the street in her wheel chair for an outing. They are almost her extension, her connection to health and vigor.

The film is told without any commentary. We are forced, a little like the students, to make our own way through its layers and to piece together its mosaic. This whole experience is filled with questions, because not all things we observe are immediately clear. The characters—real students—the relationships are sometimes vague and not easy to pigeonhole. But the cumulative effect of being wrapped in this voyage of discovery is enervating and energizing—you end up empathizing with the kids, rooting for them, becoming a part of their support team, wanting them all to make it. Perhaps most exciting is the revelation that the bright students—and we as an audience—are visibly helped by our interaction with the students with disabilities.

In a movie world which is filled with manipulation and cynicism, it is hard to imagine what future there could be, particularly in the United States, for a film like Class Life. It demands that you watch, put in some effort. It leaves many open questions. It illuminates much, but gives no easy answers. Who will come and watch these 15 Berlin students try to make it day by day through school?

For me, Class Life is a film which offers inestimable rewards. It is a film of real heroes, engaged in the real struggle to become individuals. When a teacher admits that she may have been too inflexible in dealing with a student, and later, when one of the boys admits that he didn’t try as hard as he could have, I think we see real heroism in action: real people, admitting real mistakes, learning from them, becoming better, fuller, kinder, gentler, smarter. In this sense, Class Life is a celebration of perhaps the most precious of all human capacities: to do and be all that we can be—and more.

 This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

Click here to read more transcripts.