Review: ‘Time for School: 2003-2016’ carries an emotional charge

In 2000, with more than 100 million children around the world never having attended school, 189 countries made a commitment to the United Nations to provide free primary education by 2015. In 2003, a team of field producers, originally working as part of the PBS series “Wide Angle,” began following children in “some of the most difficult places on earth to get an education,” checking in every three years, from their first days in class to what, if all went well, would be their high school graduation.

The fourth film in the series, “Time for School: 2003-2016,” premieres Thursday.

It is, of course, a cousin to Michael Apted’s famous “Up” series, which follows Britons from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds into adulthood, to examine whether class was destiny. (The latest in the still ongoing project, “56 Up,” premiered in 2012.) “Time for School” is appealing in many of the same ways — there is a special intimacy in getting to know these subjects, ordinary strangers from different worlds, over the years. (It’s the key to Richard Linklater’s film “Boyhood,” as well.) You watch them grow up, like your kids, or your friend’s kids, or your nieces and nephews; even compressed into a little less than 90 minutes, it carries an emotional charge, sometimes sweet, sometimes sad.

Set in Afghanistan, Benin, India, Brazil and Kenya, in country villages and urban slums, it’s a film about kids and the people who help them and the people who hinder them in the struggle to become a self-sufficient, self-determining adult. Not incidentally, it’s a love letter to teachers and principals, and to learning itself. (It is lovely — and educational — to behold all the forms a classroom can take.)

Two subjects, a Japanese boy and a Romanian girl — each from materially comfortable circumstances and doing well in good schools — have disappeared from the series this time, without acknowledgment. They provided an interesting contrast to the other stories. But their absence does make the new installment more specifically about circumstances and cultures that have historically kept children, or some children, from going to school — whether from lack of opportunity, the need to work, or a surfeit of stifling tradition — and where to spend one more day in a classroom is to beat the odds.

Where the last film followed its subjects individually, the new one is structured by time, visiting the five remaining students in each period in turn. The jumping about can make things a little hard to track here and there, but at the same time it highlights the kids’ common concerns and the larger issues that surround them. Some of these will be familiar to Americans — the lure of the street or the simple disaffection that keeps some kids from staying in school — others foreign. For Afghan girl Shugufa Sohrabi, a resurgent Taliban makes school attendance actually perilous.

“I hope I can finish my schooling,” Sohrabi says. “In countries where there’s war and violence, the children always have fear in their heart…. I pray to Allah for peace, so that all girls and boys can go to school. People who don’t go to school live like blind people.”

Both “Time for School: 2003-2016” and the previous film in the series, “Time for School 3,” are currently available to stream free from PBS at www.pbs.org/show/time-school.

robert,lloyd@latimes.com

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