I envy no one with the guile to be a public school teacher, especially when it involves educating anyone between the ages of 10 and 18. Not exactly an industry that one enters in order to get rich quick, it’s no wonder that teaching professionals are some of the most dedicated around, not to mention being a field susceptible to a high rate of burnout. Perfectly capturing this dichotomy is The Class, last year’s winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and France’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at this past year’s awards ceremony. I incorrectly assumed that it’d win that second one, but even though it didn’t, The Class is still a miraculous piece of filmmaking.

Anyone watching The Class might easily mistake its raw imagery and insight for a documentary; in fact there were a couple of times that I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a documentary. Based on the real life teaching experiences as recorded in a book by François Bégaudeau, the film follows a year in the life of one middle school French class. (Keep in mind of course that in France, French class is the equivalent of our English class.) Bégaudeau plays a variation on himself, Mr. Marin, who’s struggling to maintain some semblance of control over a racially diverse class of students who each have their own idea about how the class should work and what their energies are best put towards.

The wonder of The Class is that it’s not an “us versus them” duel of the wills and neither is it a Dead Poets Society tale of inspirational teaching overcoming entrenched institutional dogma. You see, teachers struggle with the incorrigible nature of some of the students, and witness how difficult the balancing act between discipline and inspiration really is. You feel for Mr. Marin and internally deride the students for their lack of respect and appreciation for their teacher’s efforts. But on the other hand, you can see where the students are coming from too; not only are they from a cultural that’s foreign to Mr. Marin, but there are each from a cultural foreign to each other.

And it may sound ignorant to say, but I think one of the highlights of the film, from my perspective, is appreciating how the melting pot isn’t a uniquely North American phenomenon. One of the more brilliant students finds himself the centre of a situation as his mother is caught for being an illegal immigrant and threatened with deportation. Another student has disciplinary issues, but his mother has a language barrier with school officials and his father seems oddly absent. But while many of the students are rambunctious, meeting with parents Mr. Marin hears about all the good kids that suffer in their education because the bad seeds sap all his energy and attention,

Like being a fly on the wall, The Class holds no judgment and no condemnation. We merely observe and try to decide for ourselves where the fault, if any, lies. Filled with humour, pathos and a serious dollop of deep humanity, The Class crosses all cultures to facilitate some kind of understanding in a just-the-facts manner. With its forward realism, the film delivers human drama with style and substance, hitting the viewer from both sides of the fence. Because if one of the problem kids can read Plato on her own outside of class, then there may be hope for the girl who, at the end of term, says to Mr. Marin that she can’t remember one thing she learned that year. Just another day in the life, as they say.