One way we make sense of time is by breaking it up into units. Être et avoir is confined to one unit of time – a year, or more exactly and evocatively, a school year. It documents how the same measure of calendar time is felt and lived differently by the individuals that share it within the correlative confines of a rural primary school in the French Alps. 

The school has just one classroom (and one teacher). So for some students this is a final, fast-moving year before moving on to middle school, while for others it’s a dizzying first experience of being away from home. We all know that time moves differently when you’re little: in one of the first scenes, kindergarten pupil Jojo asks his teacher whether it’s the afternoon or the morning. (Made to recall that he hasn’t had his lunch yet, he finds himself in the afternoon.) And as for that teacher – the unendingly patient Mr Lopez – this is his 20th year going through the motions of snowball fights, pancake days, and summer picnics. 

Nicolas Philibert’s documentary describes a world of rhythmic constancy by showing it to us experienced as fleeting and individual. With hints towards the students’ future careers (most want to be teachers, apparently) and the careful introduction of slower-moving events in the family lives of certain students, Philibert positions this tightly focussed portrait at a brief intersection of multiple long, diverse, unruly lives. We can sense this attitude in the studied approach his camera takes shot-by-shot: it focuses closely, even tenderly on the interactions of one student with Mr Lopez, or two students together. In that moment – that scrap of time – the only thing in the world are those individuals, their hushed voices, and the maths problem or secret they are sharing. But in the background, on the peripheries, someone else is alway sticking a pen up their nose, or gazing out the window, or otherwise sending signs of life from another world.

Être et avoir is available to stream as part of TANK’s season SCULPTING IN TIME. Subscribe for just £3 a month for access to 40+ films throughout the year.