Just might restore your faith in humanity.
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Maria Speth s intimate portrait of an unorthodox teacher and his sixth-grade students, most of them from immigrant families, won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlin.
When filmmaker Maria Speth brought her documentary crew to a provincial German school, her goal was open-ended observation. Observing a classroom where jam sessions and juggling lessons are as likely as instruction in math and grammar, she achieves that and more with
Mr. Bachmann and His Class, one of the most effortlessly absorbing and deeply encouraging nonfiction films of recent memory.
The Wiseman-esque doc unfolds at an unhurried and richly rewarding pace, introducing us to the industrial town of Stadtallendorf, in central Germany, before zeroing in on Class 6B of the Georg Büchner School, where Speth s friend Dieter Bachmann has been a teacher for 17 years what he laughingly calls my longest relationship. Like the great American documentarian Frederic