File this charming documentary alongside Être et Avoir in the list of films that make the case that teachers are the closest thing we have to superheroes in everyday life. John and Amanda Leyden have been teaching at Headfort school, a primary boarding school in Ireland, for all of their adult lives. Now the couple are both contemplating retirement, while nurturing yet another year of children through the Headfort curriculum, a balance of Latin, rock music and running feral in the mud. They are wonderfully idiosyncratic characters. John – dishevelled, cantankerous – runs the school band with a rod of iron wrapped in barbed sarcasm. “That wasn’t entirely bad,” he growls at one point, and the kids swell with pride. Amanda – pierced eyebrow, passion for literature and the grisly bits of history – has an instinctive empathy and understanding born of a lifetime spent defusing pre-teen crises. It’s a portrait of educational privilege, certainly, but the main privilege here is not so much the school grounds and gothic buildings but the chance to have minds shaped by the politely anarchic Leydens.
