Favoriten - English subtitled
Hopeful and engaging documentary by Ruth Beckermann that follows a multicultural primary school class in Vienna over three years. A film about teaching and learning.
The pupils at the Viennese school where Ilkay Idiskut teaches come from a wide variety of countries. Each child brings their own cultural baggage into the classroom – as we hear, for example, a boy say that girls shouldn’t wear bikinis. Hints of the children’s underlying traumas are revealed through a disturbing drawing or a question about violent child abduction.
The children are each given an iPhone to make videos, offering a glimpse into their personal lives. No matter how different the 25 boys and girls are, they have one thing in common: they are all doing their best to learn German. They are not the only ones: more than 60 percent of the children at Viennese primary schools don’t speak German as their first language. At the same time, there is a major shortage of teachers. Filmmaker Ruth Beckermann took this tension as her starting point during her three years of filming. The film was awarded the Peace Film Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. (source: www.idfa.nl)