The Last Class
- Sunday, Sep 21, 2025, 1:30pm
- Sunday, Oct 12, 2025, 1:00pm
- Sunday, Nov 2, 2025, 2:00pm
- Sunday, Nov 30, 2025, 11:00am
Screening location: SIFF Film Center – 167 Republican St, Seattle (located within the Seattle Center, just north of Climate Pledge Arena / east of KEXP and The Vera Project)
Additional showing added, November 30th, due to popular demand!
THE LAST CLASS is a nuanced and deeply personal portrait of master educator Robert Reich teaching his final course and reflecting on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. It is a love letter to education. The former Secretary of Labor might be famous for his public service, best-selling books, and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. Now, after over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, Reich is preparing for his last class.
Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality, and his own aging, with increasing candor, introspection, and, ultimately, emotion. He displays a rawness of feeling he has never shared publicly before. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he uses his class, “Wealth and Poverty,” to offer us all a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society.
One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, the last class to receive Reich’s wisdom and exhortations not to accept that the world has to stay the way it is. His belief in the next generation’s ability to take on the fight is inspiring.
“Reich is an eloquent extemporaneous speaker who knows how to keep people’s interest while coming across as authentic. That makes him a perfect subject for a documentary… it’s heartening to hear a major figure in American political history talking about the future as if it might actually happen.” Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com