Saturday, January 24, 2009


In French with English subtitles
Original title: Entre les murs

François Bégaudeau: François Marin, 30-something-year-old teacher of French literature
Jean-Michel Simonet: the school principal
Rachel Régulier: Khoumba, one of the bright students
Esméralda Ouertani: outspoken Sandra
Wei Huang: Chinese immigrant Wei
Franck Keïta: Souleymane, from the former French African colony of Mali
and some 20 others

Making use of the cinéma vérité style of filmmaking using hand held cameras the movie seems like a documentary. Virtually all the action is confined to just one classroom of a junior high school in Paris. Following the high energy discussions of these students often results in the speaker being only partially visible which adds to the sense of reality. And there does not seem to be any script per se. Neither is there any apparent costuming: everyone dresses in non-descript well-worn everyday-type of clothing which looks authentic and has that natural look about it.

Some of the dialogue is lost in translation such as when one of the students writes out the conjugated form of the imperfect subjunctive tense and her classmates make verbal jokes of what she’s written. But that does not diminish the overall feeling of being a “fly on the wall” observing a real-life class of 13 and 14-year-old students over the course of one school year.

for language.

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