Review: In ‘Miss Kiet’s Children,’ Refugees Adjust to Dutch Life

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“Miss Kiet’s Children” is a pointedly political (if overly precious) documentary set entirely at a Dutch primary school. It focuses on Kiet Engels, a teacher introduced as she methodically sets up her classroom for another day. What separates her class from those in other Dutch villages is that her students are migrant children, many of them Syrian. So in addition to the usual curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, Miss Kiet gently but determinedly instructs them in the hard work of assimilation, teaching them in Dutch and encouraging them to play with Dutch children.

Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster direct the film in a fly-on-the-wall style; the young students don’t seem bothered by the camera, at least in the footage used. And as the movie progresses, a handful of precocious personalities emerge. There is Haya, who appoints herself a mentor for a new girl, Leanne, and assists her with penmanship in a way that crosses the line from helping to bossing around. (Miss Kiet sees what’s going on and intervenes.) And there is Jorj, whose younger brother, Maksim, clings to him, who sulks when he’s told he needs to take off his outdoor shoes for gym and who struggles with math.

As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones. We learn nothing about how the school runs or why it’s a locus for refugees. The film includes only incidental tidbits about the students’ lives outside the classroom or before their arrival in the Netherlands, although in a charged moment late in the film, Miss Kiet asks Jorj about his life in Syria, where he played football inside the house to avoid what he calls the “bang, bang” outside.

“Miss Kiet’s Children” may seem soft and insubstantial in isolation, but it’s worth remembering that the movie was made before the far-right politician Geert Wilders fell short of gaining the seats his party sought in the 2017 Dutch election. Nor is the movie’s message limited to Holland. At Film Forum, “Miss Kiet’s Children” will screen with a Norwegian short that is animated in a style that suggests Jacob Lawrence and is drawn from interviews with children from Ivory Coast.