Beckermann’s school documentary “Favorites”: Martial Arts Integration

What is more important, mom or God? When the filmmaker equips the schoolchildren with cell phone cameras (without internet access), the kids interview each other. Before that, the boys had said in class that boys can do anything except hit and push, and that girls should be pretty.

Do you want to get married, they want to know from each other. “No,” they would rather have a good job, time for adventure and for themselves. What career aspirations are they? Hodja, police officer, scientist, nurse.

In her films, the Austrian documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann poses social questions that are as pressing as they are repressed: about co-responsibility for National Socialism (“Beyond War”), about Austrofascism and anti-Semitism (“Waldheim’s Waltz”) or, most recently, in “Mutzenbacher”, about erotic fantasies.

For her latest production, “Favoriten”, which premiered at the Berlinale, she and a small team spent three years following a primary school class in Vienna’s Favoriten district, a so-called problem area. All of the students are migrant children, and almost all speak several languages, including Chechen, Russian, Albanian, Arabic, Turkish and some English. What a wealth of knowledge. The parents are construction workers, cleaners and geriatric nurses, which means they work in jobs that maintain the system. “My dad makes zebra crossings,” says one.

But the kids have a hard time with German. They struggle to find the words, and want to make themselves understood in writing: martial arts integration. When Melisa, who was just fascinating as a dancer in the schoolyard, desperately struggles to round off in math, a true tragedy unfolds. Johannes Hammel’s camera moves at desk height, trying to get close without being ingratiating, also in interplay with the children’s cell phone videos.

Is everyday life in a school class a minor issue? No, how bad the state of education as the basis of civil society is is also an urgent, highly political, often ignored question. Everyone is talking about integration, especially these days, and here you can see why it fails. Not because of the inquisitive children who use their minds: the way they ask about Syria when talking about Russia and Ukraine, or the way Mohammed explains to his friend what culture is (“It’s not that you dance, but how you dance: culture is something, not just anything”), is incredibly instructive. But because of an education system that is letting children down and is not even beginning to remedy the educational crisis that has existed for decades.

At the beginning of the film, we are in the middle of the pandemic, the principal of Vienna’s largest elementary school has to inform the staff that they will have to wait until the school psychologist and the social worker has to do without, and language support is also not taking place due to a lack of staff. Which is why Ruth Beckermann’s film could also be called “Mrs. Idiskut and her class”, after Maria Speth’s long-term study “Mr. Bachmann and his class”, the Berlinale audience favorite of 2021. Because the class teacher Ilkay Idiskut makes up for a lot, with commitment, empathy, temperament and a clear attitude.

Idiskut acts not only as a teacher, but also as an aerobics dancer, animator, social worker, translator, mediator and secretary. Above all, she turns the class into a school of democracy, not only encourages Alper, Majeda, Melisa, Mohammed, Nerjiss and the others, but also challenges them, sharpens their sense of community and justice.

© Ruth Beckermann Film Production

Are girls allowed to wear bikinis? “Showing your stomach is haram, says Dad,” says one girl. “I choose my own clothes,” Idiskut replies to the skeptical boys. As soon as violence comes into play, she becomes relentless, insisting that the quarrelers say what they have done, that all sides have their say, and that conflicts are resolved verbally. The power of the strongest? Discrimination against the new classmate (“she has lice”)? Not with Ilkay Idiskut. “Are you so weak that you beat up girls?” she wants to know from Ibro.

“Favoriten” also shows religious education classes, which are attended exclusively by Muslim children. All the others have been withdrawn by their parents. In the mosque they are in their element, playing imam, knowing the prayers by heart. When visiting St. Stephen’s Cathedral, it becomes clear how the majority of society imagines participation: “This is your St. Stephen’s Cathedral too,” says the priest. The children are more interested in why there are figurative representations here, unlike in the mosque. Questions that someone just needs to take up.

A few months before the end of the fourth school year, Ilkay Idiskut goes on maternity leave; no one is taking over her job. This is what participation looks like in reality: the chance of at least some of the two dozen children going to high school is reduced even further. The credits reveal that a replacement was found at the last minute. But that is little consolation in view of the children’s hunger for education, for whom hardly anyone cares about their future. Teachers like Ilkay Idiskut are fighting a losing battle.