Drama
French (Ça commence aujourd'hui)
1999 · Directed by Bertrand Tavernier · 117 min
In a depressed former mining town in northern France, the head of a nursery school tries to keep his young pupils fed, warm and cared for while local politics and social services fail them. A humane, angry drama about work that rarely gets noticed.
Why it matters in cinema history
A key French social-realist drama of the late 1990s, it links the humanist tradition of Renoir and neorealism to the wave of films about schools and welfare that followed.
Watch with intention
Watch the film as a study of institutions: what a single decent person can and cannot change from inside one.
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