With Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir inaugurated a film genre in 1989: that of the teacher who brings out the best in a wayward student. Many films have followed in the footsteps of Weir, some good, others worse and even a few uninteresting mid-afternoon TV movies.
But the genre has left notable titles. The most recent, The Teacher Who Promised the Sea, a film directed by Patricia Font, with Enric Auquer in the role of Antonio Benaiges, a teacher who managed to awaken interest in learning in a rural school in Burgos during the Second Republic.
The film is based on real events. The same as Radical, directed by Christopher Zalla, which hits Spanish screens today and is a sign that excellent cinema can be made within the framework of this genre. Something that critics have already detected, because Radical won the Biznaga de Oro for best Ibero-American film last week at the Malaga Festival.
A Eugenio Derbez in a state of grace here plays Sergio, a teacher who, to the astonishment of the entire faculty, asks for a place at the difficult José Urbina López school in the dangerous maritime and border city of Matamoros (Mexico), where drug traffickers, Violence and poverty are rampant.
It doesn't seem like Sergio has much to do because the male primary school students are destined to leave school to join a band. The future of the girls is not very promising either. Caring for their parents and siblings and, over time, their husbands and children.
But Sergio's innovative method, his insistence and his affection make the children open up little by little, to delve into what really interests them, to look at the world, to discover the pleasure of learning.
The teacher also has a lot to gain from these students. Zalla's camera follows the story of Paloma, played by Jennifer Trejo, a girl who lives with her father in a garbage dump, who hides books under her bed so that no one knows that she aspires to study and learn, that she builds with the remains she He finds among the trash a telescope that NASA would envy, which solves very complex mathematical problems in just a few minutes. A girl destined for poverty... or maybe not.
