Went to the cinema last night. Well, not the cinema exactly, but to a local theatre that’s staging its winter film season. I’ve booked for most evenings this week (except tonight), and twice on Saturday, catching up on films that I missed at the cinema. This mainly due to the woeful lack of imagination and courage shown by the major cinema chains when selecting films for the circuit; they simply don’t show the majority of the movies I’m seeing at our local Odeon.

The film yesterday was titled Etre Et Avoir. Directed in 2002 by Nicolas Philbert, shown in French with subtitles, the documentary charts the events within a single class school over the course of one academic year. The result is a humanistic and captivating look at modern primary education in the farming village of Saint-Etienne-sur-Usson, population 200, located in the mountains of Auvergne.

Each school day, a speedy white van collects the children from their parents, mainly farmers or labourers, to deliver them into the care of the school’s teacher, Georges Lopez. In his 21st year at the school, Monsieur Lopez, a sober but kindly figure with his spectacles and goatee, is only a few terms from retirement. Mentioning this fact during a discussion with his small band of 13 children, aged 4 to 11, and asked if he’ll miss teaching them, he somewhat unconvincingly shrugs off the question by saying he ‘has plenty of things I want to do’. This may be so, but his dedication borders on the ecclesiastical, even monastic and it’s hard to imagine a life for him away from the classroom.

The film concentrates on Georges Lopez, the solitary, dedicated professional, the only glimpse into his domestic life being a brief sequence showing some energetic garden tidying. We have no clue as to personal relationships or whether he has children of his own.

Etre Et Avoir reaches out on many levels. Emotions move freely from laughter to tears as the real, everyday life of the children unfolds onscreen, but the film skilfully avoids sentimentality. Unlike Lopez, there is a peek into the home lives of a handful of his charges. One of the older boys is shown struggling through his maths homework at the kitchen table. watched over by his increasingly frustrated mother who dishes out the odd slap to encourage his concentration.

The mother and son double act eventually draws in most of the family, including an uncle, all contributing their less than accurate versions of the answer to the mathematical question. The scene then cuts to the 11-year-old boy expertly manoeuvering a tractor around his father’s farmyard, shooting us forward to show the life he’s probably destined to live: that of a farmer’s son, where his mathematical skills will be put to use to work out the cost of cattle feed and to calculate the size of the EU agricultural subsidy he can expect to receive.

Back in the classroom, Monsieur Lopez readies the children for a lifetime of obedience, conformity and work, applying teaching methods that in this country appear quaintly old fashioned, with none of the new-fangled modernism that now pervades our own primary education. In France there is still a place for repetition, copying from the board and times tables; although apparently, the director deliberately avoided showing the school’s computers.

The film ends with the charismatic teacher - who also acts as friend, father and confessor - briefing the leavers on what to expect when they move on to the new school next term. Lopez gives it to them straight in a matter of fact way, pulling no punches, saying that is precisely what they can expect as a welcome. ‘But you’re big strong lads’, he says, ‘and you can look after yourselves.’ The two boys grin bravely, wanting to believe him.

If you long for a film free of fictionalised violence, profanity and obscenity, that shows the difficulties of growing up in an unsentimental, up-close and genuinely personal way, Etre Et Avoir is for you.