Éclaireuses

Edited by: Méline Van Aelbrouck

Mixed by: Senjan Jansen

Colour: Peter Bernaert.

Visions du Réel, Festival Jean Rouch, Millenium (Belgium), Etats-Généraux du Film Documentaire de Lussas, Filmer le travail

Spanish première

Marie and Juliette quit their teaching jobs to open La Petite Ecole in the heart of Brussels where children, without former schooling and often exiled, are welcomed. Leaving aside formal learning, they offer them space and time to be children again before facing school which will expect them to be students. This film walks us through their efforts and research and thereby forces us to see the schooling system as a possible perpetuator of oppression that affects us all.

In Brussels, in the window of what looks like a shop, coloured letters say: La petite école (The Little School). There two women, Marie and Juliette, have set up a small school that takes children, whose parents are often exiles or refugees, who have never been to school and gives them a time to adapt to such an essentially strange place: a school. In this new in-between place they have invented and constantly need to reinvent, Marie and Juliette work with the children, and they also think, talk, confront other settings, both academic and institutional. This is a film that attentively observes a place, two women and some children. It's a film about intelligence, about a constant to and fro between practice and theory: we think because we do, we do because we think. Words become actions, action generates new words. It's exciting to see this: in a small place in the city two people are working on reality, and in doing so, as they make a reality they think about it and question it. Gradually they come to question the very place they come from, the place through which we all pass, school. Without realising, we have our certainties stripped away and at the same time we are shown that there, where the certainties come to an end, something can be done, something happens.

Pablo García Canga