On the Way to School revisited: French documentary shows the epic treks four impoverished children have to make to get to school
This documentary follows four children as they undertake difficult journeys to get to school in Kenya, Argentina, India and Morocco.
The scenery is breathtaking but the film doesn't go much beyond the obvious difficulty of the treks, and offers no questions about social, cultural or gender equality.
French documentary On the Way to School ( Sur le Chemin de l'Ecole) is visually opulent and genuinely inspiring, despite being a little mawkish in places.
Directed and co-scripted (with Marie-Claire Javoy) by nature filmmaker Pascal Plisson, it follows four children from different corners of the world who have to travel long distances to attend school.
Jackson is an 11-year-old Kenyan who walks 15 kilometres every morning through the African savannah along with his younger sister. In Morocco, Zahira is a 12-year-old Muslim girl who crosses 22 kilometres of the Atlas Mountains weekly to her room-and-board classroom. Eleven-year-old Argentinian Carlito rides 18 kilometres through Patagonia's slippery, rocky mountains and grassy plains. And most heart-wrenchingly, Samuel is a physically disabled 13-year-old Indian peasant his two younger able-bodied siblings have to push in a rusty wheelchair along unpaved roads for five kilometres each morning.
Just the idea of a child making such a odyssey to further his or her education is touching, and it's hard not to get choked up seeing these tiny, heroic figures stoically embark on their epic journeys against almost impossible terrain - and even wild animals.
There are those who will criticise Plisson's cinematic tales for not offering much more than superficial empathy for the film's junior underdogs, and it could be argued that for a documentary purportedly promoting education, the film does seem too content to work the heart but not engage the brain.
The breathtaking vistas in East and North Africa, South America and India all look great but they don't aid the Walt Disney France release in doing more than stirring emotions. Plisson is not especially interested in doing more than chronicling these Herculean school treks.
The film also shows cases that could prompt profound questions about social, cultural or gender equality, but the director-scriptwriter almost never presents real contexts for these scenarios.