Orhan Eskiköy & Ozgür Dogan/ Turkey/Netherlands 2009/ 81 min/ 12A/ Turkish and Kurdish with English subtitles
With record numbers of people opting for gap years or embarking on TEFL courses to go out and spread the tongue of the coloniser, the question of how much good teaching English does is becoming increasingly complicated. But for most children living a village life, they must entirely reject their mother tongue for fear of being caned or held by police. The youngsters in this new documentary from Ozgür Dogan and Orhan Eskikoy are unwittingly thrust to the front of this debate. In Turkey, newly qualified teachers are required to spend a year in a rural Kurdish area to enforce the rules and teach the Turkish word: “Happy is the one who calls himself a Turk.”
The peppering of satellite dishes across the village suggests that this won’t be their last interaction with Western ideals
City slicker Emre Aydin is our fresh faced teacher, thrown into the deep end with a dilapidated school, ants in his room and no running water. Unimpressed he gels his hair carefully and heads out to the dusty schoolyard. After rounding up his pupils from various tomato fields, he realises that not only do the children have minimal pencil rations, but a majority of them only speak Kurdish. Alarmed by the inability to communicate with the class, Emre is forced to go back to the basics and teach the seven-year-olds from scratch. But with no common tongue to share this leads to frustration and multiple phone calls back to his mum for support.
Dogan and Eskikoy put themselves firmly behind the camera allowing the action to unfold naturally. Both languages are translated in different colours which allows us to see the jokes Emre is missing, but he takes it all in good humour and to a bunch of chuckling kiddies in the playground says: “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?” with a grin stretched across his face. But the frivolity soon becomes frustration when Emre begins to realise the children have no idea what the words they are learning mean. It’s the futility of this style of teaching and complete ignorance from the education system that this documentary captures effortlessly and impartially. What is the point in teaching children to pronounce “parsley” correctly if they have no idea what it is? Ultimately though, we’re left wondering what the fate of these children is. The peppering of satellite dishes across the village suggests that this won’t be their last interaction with Western ideals, but when Emre’s gone will they slip back into their forgotten Kurdish world?
On the Way to School showing @Filmhouse Wed 17 Feb 20:55
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