Protected: Music in war: soldiers in Iraq rap out their experiences

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Music in war: soldiers in Iraq rap out their experiences

This is a transcript of the rather disturbing experiences of George Gittoes, Australian artist and filmmaker who has been making a documentary about the music soldiers in Iraq are listening to, as well as making. I heard it on Monday and the transcript became available today –

Music in war: soldiers in Iraq rap out their experiences
The World Today – Monday, 26 April , 2004 12:41:54
Reporter: Steve Cannane
TANYA NOLAN: As most of the country celebrates the Anzac Day holiday today, it’s the haunting melody of The Last Post that is the most recognisable feature of the official commemorations, particularly for younger generations. And music has long played an important role in war, from the big bands in World War Two to the popular music which is so much associated with Vietnam.

(excerpt from movie Good Morning Vietnam)

ROBIN WILLIAMS: Good morning Vietnam!

(Nowhere to Run – Martha and the Vandellas)

TANYA NOLAN: And music still plays a big part in war, particularly for troops on the ground.

Australian artist and filmmaker George Gittoes has been making a documentary about the music soldiers in Iraq are listening to, as well as making.

He gained rare access to American troops over the past 12 months, and in this conversation with Steve Cannane, from Triple J’s Hack program, he gives us a taste of the sort of music that’s emerged from the war in Iraq.

GEORGE GITTOES: One of the big changes is that a lot of the music is now being generated by the soldiers themselves. There’s been this revolution where they’ve got their own computer studios and so the concerts in the past where they were singing kind of covers, it’s all original material and that’s pretty exciting, except that the concerts are no longer for good things, they’re memorial services.

STEVE CANANNE: So they’re writing songs for their fallen comrades?

GEORGE GITTOES: Yeah, and it’s become a new genre where, for everyone who is killed, there will be a musician – whether it’s a rapper or a punk rocker – who is a close friend who will do a song that is part of the memorial service and then that will be put together as a CD, DVD and sent to the family and it’s a great way of showing, through music, how much you care.

STEVE CANNANE: You’ve brought some music in and it’s a guy called Moses.

GEORGE GITTOES: Yeah, Momo.

STEVE CANNANE: Can you tell us about him?

GEORGE GITTOES: Momo’s fantastic. He says, you know, “my job, I could be dead in two seconds”. He’s handling the oil tankers that service the tanks and everything you know, and the American, they don’t, the American tanks come up to like a tanker and they just put fuel in and yeah, just any small rocket or bullet can take him out. And he’s been a performing artist for years, like, as a soldier. He’s always in trouble. He’s always on gate duty or something.

There’s an incredible scene in the film where I was just filming him doing a rap about his job and this is in the heat of all the battles that are going on and these special forces guys pull up in their Humvee, totally unaware of the camera, and they say “what are you doing here?” And I say, “I am making a film about music”. And they say, “oh yeah, well, music, we’re going to go make some music of our own” and they jump back in and they drive off and their music is with guns.

And I also said, you know, Moses is a rapper. They didn’t look at him and it’s just the total racial thing still going on there. These guys were white and from the south and they didn’t even want to look at Moses, and then that was great, ’cause it got his adrenalin going and he just, off the top of his head, “off his dome” as he said, made up a rap piece about being a refueller in Baghdad.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP: Bad woods deep inside. Better hide ’cause them boys making noise with them toys. Charge or sale? You goin’ need it when you call up your boys. Don’t matter where you’re from, it’s the one that you are. See, you’re white and that’s nice, so I guess I got my gas. Don’t act…

GEORGE GITTOES: There’s groups of soldiers everywhere that have found their own little space, usually in a tent or under a truck, where they’ve managed to, they can get this equipment mailed to them and they’re turning, you know, their spaces in Iraq into studios. In fact, that’s something great to see all this creativity coming out of the war.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP: This is war, this be the war…

GEORGE GITTOES: There was this captain at the palace, when I did the Uday Palace thing, that was absolutely off his head on something and that seems really wild on film, that they’re all using incredibly bad language and it’s porno rap and stuff. And I went back to him this time, it’s like the scene in Apocalypse Now, this place was just coming apart and this guy was even more off his head. It was like he was on acid or something and you realise they’re sending these soldiers out in this state of mind.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP: Right. Right. Smoke 20 smokes and get high if you want to. (Do what you want to) Right. Right…

GEORGE GITTOES: Anyway, I ran into Chris and he’s only 19 and a lovely kid. He grew up in a black neighbourhood. He’s white. And it was the middle of all the fighting and he was in a strategic point and I said hello to him and then I saw him that night and he’d caught a whole lot of, he and his little group of 19 year olds, had caught a whole bunch of Shias in their black pyjamas. They’re sort of like the Vietcong, and they had bags over their heads and they had them tied up and Chris was grinning from ear to ear, like a kid who had caught some rabbits or something, but these were human beings.

And then the next morning I saw him and I said “Chris, are you going to be around for the rest of the day?” and he said “I hope not, I’ve been on all night” and then I saw him again the following night and he hadn’t been relieved from that strategic position where he’d been fighting and capturing people for 48 hours. He hadn’t had any sleep. So, you know.

STEVE CANNANE: Which makes it impossible doesn’t it, to make rational decisions about who is who in a situation like that?

GEORGE GITTOES: Well I’ve got the most incredible moment I’ve ever filmed, I’m lucky to still be alive, where one of these guys like Chris, I’m just filming and I suddenly see him pick up his camera, take aim and shoot me and thank God he missed.

And the same day I stopped using my number one camera because I thought and my number two camera got shot out of my hand. I don’t know whether it was by an American or an Iraqi, a sniper got it.

So that’s how much it has become a war zone.

STEVE CANNANE: So why did he shoot at you, George?

GEORGE GITTOES: Well, I assumed if he’d hit me he would have said that my camera looked like a rocket launcher, but it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t, you know…

I’d say he was off his head. So many of these guys are.

STEVE CANNANE: Are they off their heads too because they’ve been told they’re only going to be there for a certain amount of time and that keeps getting extended?

GEORGE GITTOES: That’s a big part of it. Most of them seem to have accepted that better than I expected, but they were off their heads anyway. I mean they’ve been away for a year.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP: …where the sun don’t shine. This be the war, this be the war…

GEORGE GITTOES: I went to Baghdad this time because I knew that the whole American army was doing a changeover, like, the soldiers had been there. And I knew that these resistance people were so well organised that that would be the vulnerable time to whack the Americans.

Americans are very foolish in that every unit has its own equipment, its own tanks, its own trucks and things. It all goes back with the unit. You don’t just get a whole lot of new soldiers. So, they take their eye off the ball. They start cleaning their trucks and their tanks and everything to take them back to America. So they become dysfunctional and obviously it was a time to hit them and historically, it was the 9th of April, you know, the day the statue was knocked down and it was also the great martyr of Shia-ism’s Holy Day, plus it was Easter.

So, and the Americans couldn’t see it and now these poor soldiers who were all getting ready to go home, have got to stay three months because they realise that’s what left them vulnerable.

But me, George Gittoes, I’m no military strategist, but I knew that these guys would do it and I’d even talked to them and they said, “yeah, we’re going to wait until the Americans are vulnerable and that’s when we’re going to hit them”. So I knew that this would be like a Tet Offensive.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP: This be the war, this be the war. This be the war, this be the war…

STEVE CANNANE: What about the Iraqis themselves that you spoke to, what do they think about what is going on?

GEORGE GITTOES: The sad thing about Iraq is that the people there really do want freedom and election and, you know, Australians who naively say well, these Muslims, these Arabs in Iraq, they’ve never known democracy so they wouldn’t want it. That’s nonsense. They’ve known the horror of not having democracy, of having Saddam and now virtually everyone I know is asking if I can help get them a visa to Australia.

So people who are very positive, who wanted to help reconstruct the country… like just talking about music, my favourite band in Baghdad, the heavy metal group, their bass guitarist accepted a job, they all speak really good English, with the Coalition and he started getting hate mail and finally he got popped. You know, someone from the resistance came up and shot him in the head.

And so that group of musicians who would like to see an Iraq where they can play their own kind of music, they just want to get out. In fact that was what was so hard this time. A lot of the best musicians in Iraq have left because they can see, for example, heavy metal is seen as satanic by Shia fundamentalists like Moqtada al Sadr and so, you know, these guys feel very frightened.

Any kind of musician that is absorbing Western influences, doing rap, hip hop, heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, punk, you know, they can be killed for doing their music.

EXCERPT FROM MOSES’ RAP SONG: …little nigger, makin’ beats like this here. This be the war, like my cuz, Neil, back on the block. This be the war, like the sea nigger bang in the stocks. This be the war, ah, this be the war, ah, this be the war…

TANYA NOLAN: That’s a taste of some of the music coming out of Iraq. That track from American soldier Moses. I’m not sure whether that will catch on like Nowhere to Run to by Martha and the Vandellas, but we will see.

Steve Cannane and George Gittoes before that and our thanks to Triple J and Hack for that interview.

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Protected: End of Democracy

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End of Democracy

Read this article in the paper today.

Is this the end of democracy?
April 27, 2004

The West is restricting freedom in response to terror. We must not acquiesce, writes Richard Rorty.

Europe is coming to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda’s opponent is the West, not just America. The interior ministers of the EU nations have been holding meetings to co-ordinate anti-terrorist measures. The outcome of these meetings is likely to determine how many of their civil liberties Europeans will have to sacrifice.

We can be grateful that the recent terrorist attack in Madrid involved only conventional explosives. Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever measures the interior ministers have previously agreed to propose will seem inadequate. They will hold another meeting, at which they will agree on more draconian measures.

If terrorists do get their hands on nuclear weapons, the most momentous result will not be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It will be the fact that all the democracies will have to place themselves on a permanent war footing.

The measures their governments will consider it necessary to impose are likely to bring about the end of many of the socio-political institutions that emerged in Europe and North America in the past two centuries. They may return the West to something like feudalism.

The actions of the Bush Administration since September 11 have caused many Americans to think of the war on terrorism as potentially more dangerous than terrorism itself, even if it entailed nuclear explosions in many Western cities. If the direct effects of terrorism were all we had to worry about, their thinking goes, there would be no reason to fear that democratic institutions would not survive. After all, equivalent amounts of death and destruction caused by natural disasters would not threaten those institutions. If there were a sudden shift of tectonic plates that caused skyscrapers to collapse all around the Pacific Rim, hundreds of thousands of people would die within minutes. But the emergency powers claimed by governments would be temporary and local.

It is only in the US that the Government has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously. In a worst-case scenario, historians will have to explain why the golden age of democracy lasted only about 200 years.Yet if much less severe damage occurred as a result of terrorism, the officials charged with national security, those who bear the responsibility for preventing further attacks, will probably think it necessary to end the rule of law, as well as the responsiveness of governments to public opinion. Politicians and bureaucrats will strive to outdo one another in proposing outrageous measures. The rage felt when immense suffering is caused by human agency rather than by forces of nature will probably lead the public to accept these measures.

The result would not be a fascist putsch, but rather a cascade of government actions that would, in the course of a few years, bring about a fundamental change in the conditions of social life in the West.

The courts would be brushed aside, and the judiciary would lose its independence. Regional military commanders would be given the kind of authority that once belonged to locally elected officials. The media would be coerced into leaving protests against government decisions unreported.

Fear of such developments is, of course, more common among Americans like me than among Europeans. For it is only in the US that the Government has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously by the citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of Attorney-General John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress, I have spent more time worrying about what my Government will do than about what the terrorists will do.

The Patriot Act was a very complex omnium gatherum, hundreds of pages long. Like its British analogue, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, it was rushed through after September 11. Both pieces of legislation were probably drawn up simply by asking the security agencies to list the restrictions they found most inconvenient. We shall soon learn whether the Madrid bombings trigger the same sort of reaction by all or most of the governments of the EU.

I don’t think the Bush Administration is filled with power-hungry crypto-fascists. Neither are the German or Spanish or British governments. But I do think the end of the rule of law could come about almost inadvertently through the sheer momentum of the institutional changes that are likely to be made in the name of the war on terrorism.

If there were a dozen successful terrorist attacks on European capitals, and if some of them used nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the military and the national security bureaucracies in all the European countries would, almost inevitably, be granted powers that they had not previously wielded.

The public would find this fitting and proper. Local police forces would probably start working on instructions from the national capital. Any criticism by the media would be seen by the government as a source of aid and comfort to terrorism. European ministers of justice would echo Ashcroft’s reply to critics of the Patriot Act. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” Ashcroft said, “my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”

Such developments would gradually reduce the effectiveness of the various institutions that have made it possible for public opinion to influence the actions of democratic governments. At the end of this process of erosion, democracy would have been replaced by something quite different. This would probably be neither military dictatorship nor Orwellian totalitarianism, but rather a relatively benevolent despotism.

That sort of power structure survived the end of the Soviet Union and is now resolidifying under Vladimir Putin and his fellow KGB alumni. The same structure seems to be taking shape in China and in South-East Asia.

In countries run in this way, public opinion does not greatly matter. Elections may still be held, but opposition parties are not allowed to pose any serious threat to the powers that be. Careers are less open to talent, and more dependent on connections with powerful persons. Since the courts and the police review boards are relatively powerless, it is often necessary for shopkeepers to pay protection money to the police, or to criminals tolerated by the police, to stay in business. It is dangerous for citizens to complain about corruption or abuse of power by public officials. High culture is restricted to areas that are irrelevant to politics (as it was in the Soviet Union, and still is in China). No more uncensored media. No more student demonstrations. Not much in the way of civil society.

Life for much of the world would not be greatly changed if the dismal scenario I have just outlined were to play out in the West. For in the poor countries most of society has always been, and still is, organised along feudal lines. In north-east Brazil, as in the villages of equatorial Africa and Central Asia, nobody would notice that the world had changed, that a light had gone out. But in the countries in which the greatest moral progress has been made, that progress would cease. After a few generations, utopian fantasies of an open society might be cherished only by a few readers of old books.

Is there anything the citizens of the West can do to make it less likely that their grandchildren will live under the sort of neo-feudalism I have described? The only thing I can think of that might make a difference is a willingness to challenge the culture of government secrecy.

Demands for government openness should start in the areas of nuclear weaponry and of intelligence-gathering – the places where the post-World War II obsession with secrecy began.

As a first step, the citizenry could demand that their governments publish the facts about their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Then they might insist that these governments make public the details of two sets of planned responses: one to the use of such weapons by other governments, and another for their use by criminal gangs such as al-Qaeda.

They could also demand that their governments join in efforts to update the laws of war, and to create something like a code of international criminal justice. As many legal scholars have been pointing out since September 11, the laws of war were designed to cover the acts of national governments. Criminal law was intended to deal with acts committed within a nation’s borders by its own citizens.

There are plenty of grey areas where neither sort of law applies. In these areas, governments are now pretty much free to do as they please: to parachute hit squads into Third World countries in which terrorists are thought to be holding meetings, to bring about regime change in nations suspected of supporting terrorists, and so on. There is not much point in saying that such actions are against international law: they may prove to be the only way of preventing, for example, nerve gas in the London Underground.

Updated laws, openly agreed on by international bodies and adopted, after debate, by national governments, would specify when such actions were legitimate. Such updating would provide a good occasion to draw up new multilateral agreements, and to think about using the United Nations for new purposes.

If Western governments were made to disclose and discuss what they plan to do in various sorts of emergency, it would at least be slightly harder for demagogic leaders to argue that the most recent attack justifies their doing whatever they like. Crises are less likely to produce institutional change, and to have unpredictable results, if they have been foreseen and discussed.

Open discussion of needed changes in international law should be accompanied by a new openness about many other topics. There is no good reason why the governments of France, Britain, the US and Israel should not inform their citizens about the nuclear devices they have in stock. Nor is there any reason not to disclose the full history of the development of chemical and biological weapons. It is time for the public to be shown the texts of the agreements between governments that have made it possible to girdle the globe with more than 700 US military bases. There was little enough reason for refusing to make this sort of information public even when the Cold War was at its height. It is hard to imagine what help its disclosure could give to the terrorists.

The progress humanity made in the 19th and 20th centuries was largely due to the increased role of public opinion in determining government policies. But the lack of public concern about government secrecy has, in the past 60 years, created a new political culture in each of the democracies. In the US and in many EU countries an elite has come to believe it cannot carry out its mission of providing national security if its preparations are carried out in public. The events of September 11 greatly strengthened this conviction. Further attacks are likely to persuade those elites they must destroy democracy in order to save it.

In a worst-case scenario, historians will someday have to explain why the golden age of Western democracy lasted only about 200 years. The saddest pages in their books are likely to be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in government secrecy, helped bring the disaster on themselves.

Professor Richard Rorty teaches philosophy at Stanford. A longer version of this essay appeared in The London Review of Books.

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Protected: Original Policies from our PM When Hell Freezes Over

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Original Policies from our PM When Hell Freezes Over

Now our PM has decided to copy Dubya’s domestic policies as well.

PM to block gay unions: report

Prime Minister John Howard will overhaul the marriage act to stop Australian courts recognising foreign gay unions.

The Australian newspaper reports Mr Howard is planning the radical reforms to defend traditional families.

The changes will prevent gay couples from gaining recognition of their unions by marrying in countries such as Canada or Denmark.

Proposed amendments to the act could result in marriage being defined in legislation as between a man and a woman.

The move follows US President George W Bush’s move to ban same-sex marriages, the paper says.

The reforms are expected to result in a clash between the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Mark Latham.

And John Howard has the temerity to accuse Mark Latham of plagiarism. Latham may have been inspired by one of Clinton’s speeches on education policy, but I don’t think he has duplicated wholesale almost the entire policy from his administration. Our PM seems to have just given up on independent policy development, recycling Dubya’s seems easier I guess.

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Protected: And the award for the most unoriginal politician goes to…

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And the award for the most unoriginal politician goes to…

I should have known he would pull a stunt like this. Our PM has decided to copy Dubya with a flying visit to “our boys” in Iraq on ANZAC Day one of the few national holidays Australians take seriously. The only turkey I could see there was our PM. If Dubya jumps off a cliff tomorrow or starts cross-dressing our PM will be off that cliff so fast, lemmings ain’t in it and with the fish-net stockings and the matching boa wrapped round his neck. Oh sorry, I forget fish-net stockings and drag was our foreign minister, Alexander Downer’s speciality. I think because he is taller than little Johnny his legs look better and he has that faux plummy upper-class English accent (only spoiled by a little Aussie whine) while Johnny is too short by half and drones and whines alternatively.

Thinking of more pleasant things I saw the first episode of the second series of Foyle’s War tonight. Excellent English police/detective series set in Hastings in WWII. Really like the main actor, Michael Kitchen, plays it very understated. I do laugh though at the name of the woman who plays his driver. Her name is Honeysuckle Weeks. What was her mother thinking when she named her I wonder?

Then the excellent program, Compass showed a documentary on Peter Singer the professor of bioethics and philosophy at Princeton. Interesting points raised in the documentary, when you think about what he is really saying I can see his point. Initially you tend to reject some of his theories merely on emotional grounds as abhorrent but when he is more specific and gives clearer definitions to what he means and you hear about his family history in Austria, it stuns me that people accuse him of being a Nazi. But then the people doing that I suspect may fall in the right to life groups, the ones who respect the sanctity of a foetus but don’t mind blowing up or shooting an adult human being. These same people who accuse him of not having respect for life, sent death threats to him and his family when he took up his position at Princeton. I can see how he could be accused of being a stirrer. He says some pretty challenging things, but his goal is to get people to start thinking, just not relying on assumptions that are generally held in society.

There was also an interesting radio program earlier this evening on The Mind of the Fundamentalist. Here is the Summary of the show –

Summary
At a conference organised to explore the mind of the fundamentalist, three speakers present their perspective on this issue. Former foreign-correspondent Christopher Kremmer relates his encounter with a Hindu hijacker; psychoanalyst, Shahid Najeeb, provides a classical analysis of fundamentalism “from the couch”; and Rachael Kohn examines Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, as a fundamentalist film.

The transcript can be read at –

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s1091177.htm

or listened to at –

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/default.htm
I was so annoyed that I missed the program of Hans Blix addressing the Commonwealth Club. Hopefully they will repeat it later in the week.

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Être et Avoir

I went to see this documentary today. I felt it would be the perfect antidote to all the pompous and hypocritical guff that is spouted by our politicians on Anzac Day. Politicians like our current PM who will send our servicemen to Iraq merely because he wants to maintain his “special” relationship with Dubya, knowing full well the reasons for going to war were spurious and quite happy to quote Dubya chapter and verse about the dangers of the WMDs that have not been found and the threat they pose to us.

He will probably be on the news pontificating and carrying on about mateship and the courage of our servicemen, but using them in a low attempt to boost his own credibility, as he has for the last year. Everytime there was a return of servicemen, army or navy little Johnny Howard would be there glad-handing, creating photo-ops for himself, wrapping himself almost in the Australian flag. What was the old saying about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel?

They must have meant it for him, but then it probably applied to the politicians at the time of the outbreak of WWI who sent the original ANZACs to fight and die at Gallipoli. Turkey too was no threat to anyone really and it was merely the imperial interests of France and England, their desire for access to the oil in Iraq and other places that made it imperative to fight Turkey. WWI really was not much different than the current situation, imperialists squabbling over who gets the most in carving up what was left of the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, its just they fought a large part of it in Europe. The US has done better at shielding the consequences of war from its population by keeping all the death and destruction consequent to its imperialist manipulations safely abroad and only providing carefully edited versions to the folks back home of their bloody and destructive activities in Iraq & Afghanistan.

Well as I said this documentary was a welcome relief from the hypocrisy and is very engaging.

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Être et Avoir

I went to see this documentary today. I felt it would be the perfect antidote to all the pompous and hypocritical guff that is spouted by our politicians on Anzac Day. Politicians like our current PM who will send our servicemen to Iraq merely because he wants to maintain his “special” relationship with Dubya, knowing full well the reasons for going to war were spurious and quite happy to quote Dubya chapter and verse about the dangers of the WMDs that have not been found and the threat they pose to us.

He will probably be on the news pontificating and carrying on about mateship and the courage of our servicemen, but using them in a low attempt to boost his own credibility, as he has for the last year. Everytime there was a return of servicemen, army or navy little Johnny Howard would be there glad-handing, creating photo-ops for himself, wrapping himself almost in the Australian flag. What was the old saying about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel?

They must have meant it for him, but then it probably applied to the politicians at the time of the outbreak of WWI who sent the original ANZACs to fight and die at Gallipoli. Turkey too was no threat to anyone really and it was merely the imperial interests of France and England, their desire for access to the oil in Iraq and other places that made it imperative to fight Turkey. WWI really was not much different than the current situation, imperialists squabbling over who gets the most in carving up what was left of the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, its just they fought a large part of it in Europe. The US has done better at shielding the consequences of war from its population by keeping all the death and destruction consequent to its imperialist manipulations safely abroad and only providing carefully edited versions to the folks back home of their bloody and destructive activities in Iraq & Afghanistan.

Well as I said this documentary was a welcome relief from the hypocrisy and is very engaging.

This documentary is set in a small provincial, one-teacher primary school, filming the teacher, Msr. Lopez and his students and some of their parents. The documentary is very spare. There is no voice over, the subjects of the documentary, the students and their teacher, their interactions tell the story simply and directly. I suppose the teacher Msr Lopez is one of those rarities, a teacher with a true vocation, that teaches for the love of it. You can see the look of loss in his eyes at the end of the film when he farewells his pupils, those who will return and those who will go on to middle school. He truly loves his charges and you feel that his only motivation is to see them bloom. His interactions with Olivier, one of the older boys whose father has cancer and with Nathalie who has some degree of autism; his honesty and kindess to her mother who is struggling to cope with her. The parents in this agricultural area have probably very little education themselves from what I could see and can’t help their children much with their education, so are dependent on him to a large degree.

The other person that stands out his Jojo, his anxious and stressed little face at times worried me. He seems to have a gift for numbers but very little ability to concentrate on other things, but he does seem to be a bright little boy. He reminded me of the child in the British Documentary series, Seven-Up, Neill who was a brilliant child, energetic and imaginative but with that same anxious strained look. His fate was to end up in a caravan somewhere in the Scottish highlands as a sort of an eccentric hermit, after he dropped out of college after a nervous breakdown. This little boy Jojo seems to exude that same degree of nervousness and strain.

The classroom scenes are interspersed with shots of the scenery of Auvergne in its different seasons. It looks to be a wild beautiful place but god-damned cold in the winter. The shots of the children on a picnic in the country-side and the subsequent search for the smallest child, Alize when she goes missing in a field of wheat? Wild grasses? as the other children and Msr Lopez all wander through it calling for her. The camera stayed though on Lopez as every teacher’s worst nightmare, a lost student sinks in. There are also scenes and scraps of the children’s conversations that just make you burst out with laughter.

All together a really enjoyable and insightful documentary.

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