About Group Homes
1991 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Sally Bochner, Wolf Koenig
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Teenagers living in group homes describe their positive and negative experiences and raise concerns about the effectiveness of social programmes with a counsellor.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A well-meaning documentary that lets teenagers talk about group homes—formally competent, structurally sound, and exactly the kind of earnest social-issue film that makes you feel like you've done your civic duty without actually disrupting anything.
Bochner and Koenig's restraint is the film's discipline: they let the counsellor's framework hold the conversation, trusting the documentary form to carry what testimony requires, situating themselves in the tradition of observational social cinema that respects both subject and structure.
The real move is the choice to keep the counsellor present and visible—it's a structural decision that reframes the entire power dynamic, making the frame itself part of what we're examining rather than hiding behind the mythology of the neutral camera.