‘Favoriten’ Review: The Classroom Is a Community in a Lively, Poignant Primary-Education Doc
variety.comJessica Kiang The kids in Ilkay Idiskut’s third grade class are, as they let you know within about five minutes of Ruth Beckermann‘s delightful Berlin Encounters documentary “Favoriten,” very much their own people.
These 25 boisterous, funny, clattering seven-year-olds attend the largest elementary school in Vienna and for the most part hail from migrant family backgrounds from Turkey or Syria or Serbia.
Diminutive in form but outsized in personality, they are also, however, eminently recognisable and relatable, and you can find all the various versions of your own grade-school self in one or other of them at some point.
The class clown. The naughty kid. The slacker. The braniac. Or the eager doofus enduring the very specific agony that is knowing the right answer, and waving your arm madly in the air, only to not be called on.
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