Etre et Avoir Documentary Key Notes

Etre et Avoir - To be and to have

• Director - Nicolas Philibert (2003)

• Philibert had set out to make a documentary about France’s changing agricultural economy and the rash of family farm bankruptcies that threatened a very French way of life.

• Philibert was keen to avoid an idealised portrait of the school “I didn’t want an approach founded on the picturesque or on nostalgia but on the desire to follow as closely as possible the work and progress of the children in a way that the spectators can share their trials, their successes, their moments of discouragement.”

• Shoot over 10 weeks (December 2000 - June 2001)

• “The film is very open, it gives everyone the possibility of projecting into it what they wish, their own memories of childhood.” - Philibert

• “Before making the film, I believe that I had forgotten to what degree it is difficult to learn but…