Favoriten (2024), Ruth Beckermann’s latest, rolls production titles over a series of children’s drawings of buildings. Following a nigh universal youthful design scheme, the drawings show tall rectangles crowded with window-signifying smaller rectangles. These high-rises twist upwards like trees straining toward the sun, some of their multicolored faces emblazoned with toothy grins and red hearts. Beckermann filmed Favoriten between the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2023, when she was installed in an elementary school in the titular tenth district of Vienna. She observes a class of twenty-some students in Vienna’s largest elementary school in its most immigrant-populous district from first through third grade, along with their teacher, Frau Idiskut.
Whereas Beckermann’s previous work has been more explicitly ideological — The Waldheim Waltz (2018), about the former Nazi’s post-war political career, for one — Favoriten allows politics to enter obliquely, around the edges of the frame. The kids in the classroom are often shot in extreme closeup, and the unobtrusiveness of her camera’s presence atop their desks attests to the relationship developed between Beckermann and the children. Their concerns guide the film: scenes are structured around class assignments, activities, and field trips. Beckermann takes particular pleasure in shooting the kids engaged in some daily physical activity initiative that necessitates their dancing to popular music at their desks. If there’s a darkness looming over these children’s precarious education, Beckermann is nonetheless faithful to their fundamentally unserious relation to the world.
“You and I sometimes go outside, and that’s culture,” a boy from Macedonia in a PlayStation shirt tells the camera, asked to define the nebulous concept. “It’s like this,” another steps in, anxious to correct the record: “For example, in a dancing culture, you don’t do it with people who are from other countries. You do it with people from your culture or with your family.” Children can be both broad- and narrow-minded, the film discovers. Their notions about the world and their place in it can seem at an early point of calcification in one moment, only to appear unfettered and up for grabs the next.
And yet, observing this lot for three years, Beckermann cannot help but document the real world that creeps into Frau Idiskut’s classroom. Childhood’s innocence slips, ever so slightly, from year to year. A new student is bullied for not speaking German; a child’s slowness in times tables, fodder for good-natured laughter early in the year, later becomes a point of contention for her immigrant parents confused by the Austrian school system’s early separation of pupils into “Mittelschule” (lower secondary school) and the “Unterstufe” (the lower level of academic school). The indefatigable Frau Idiskut weathers blow after blow to her tenuous ability to lead these students, as the underfunded school loses educational assistants and language instructors. Finding a maternity leave replacement for Idiskut herself proves to be the labor of months, and the imperiled Eden of the classroom seems to dangle over oblivion.
In the wake of Beckermann’s recent Waldheim and last year’s Mutzenbacher (2023), a wry take on male sexual fragility, Favoriten is refreshingly light and undetermined. The film’s most affecting scene finds Beckermann assigning the kids to make their own films with an iPhone. She peppers these short clips throughout — kids turn the cameras on themselves, sometimes crying about bad grades, but most often, they shoot themselves dancing as the education system fails them. This is the film’s lingering effect, despite everything, of effervescence.
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