We need to remember that there are islands of simplicity on Earth that are not necessarily marked by ignorance or contrivance. They float in places like the memories of our elementary education, rural France, and some films. Without wandering into sentimentality, the documentary Étre et Avoir presents the awkward wonders of education with a glow that can only be called joy.

Director/cinematographer Nicolas Philibert films the delicate dramas of a one-room classroom with the same hushed patience of his subject: an aging, but youthful, master educator, Georges Lopez. A quiet and firm mediator, Lopez navigates his pupils individually and collectively, with love and with reserve, through a school year. Even after thirty-five years of teaching experience, he is challenged daily by his eleven students who range from three-year-old Alizé to eleven-year-old Nathalie. They are formed into two groups, the Big ones and the Little ones, and Lopez shifts his attention with graceful intermittence.

Philibert has admitted that his principle throughout this project was not to “illustrate in images a notion worked out in advance,” but to record Lopez’ natural methods and interactions with the children. The resulting film is notably genuine. Some prolonged takes he captures could not be written or acted with more precision and effect. A calm but intense dialogue between Lopez and his two oldest boys — who had been at blows during recess — unfolds, for example, over an uncut span of ten minutes.

Elsewhere, Philibert edits his footage economically, establishing each singular member of the class starkly. Jojo, at four, is restless and unfocused, bursting with melodrama and pushing with his new brain at the boundaries of his universe. At one point Lopez challenges him to find the biggest number, and a cavalcade of half-surprises overcome the boy as he incrementally soars from twenty-nine to a five billion. Contrarily, the eldest, Nathalie, is tightly introverted, petrified of the social world. She will be moving onto middle school after this year, and the most vital teaching Lopez shares with her is not mathematics or geography, but his warmth as a teacher and friend. Anytime four-year-old Marie can point out the failings of her peers, and her dominance in anything, she does.

The longer sequences of the film are tastefully punctuated by shots of local nature, the most revelatory of which might be the sight of fir tree branches in winter being swung by a night flurry. The film’s pace and posture are as steady and as buoyant as this wind, while its richest moments of human interaction are as weighted as these boughs sagging with snow. Or consider the class’s spring picnic near an impossibly thick field of wheat; a mischievous child wanders into the golden straw to hide, while a visibly nervous Lopez and another student call her name: a startling metaphor for how some children, despite the best guidance, will erase themselves, or the promise of themselves, at an early age.

This is an even film, to be commended for its reality. Philibert tempers the adorable with the harsh, the grins with lectures on respect, the uncaring rain with small umbrellas (French for “umbrella” is parapluie, a word too lovely and melopoetic to omit) and puddles. And since much of the dialogue is in rudimentary, your high school French education might be tickled into surprising use.