Becoming 13
2006 · 47m · Canada
Directed by Victoria King
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Three 12-year-old girls are followed for a year as they cross from childhood toward maturity, revealing peer pressure's pull and family's greater influence, partly in their own diary-cam footage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Diary-cam as coming-of-age device feels like the safe choice now—everyone's doing the found-footage intimacy thing—and King doesn't subvert it enough to make the peer pressure angle sting in any unexpected way.
A formally disciplined observational documentary that trusts the year-long arc to do the work; the interweaving of direct testimony with diary footage creates a rigorous portrait of girlhood that sits comfortably within the Cinéma vérité tradition while remaining genuinely felt.
The decision to let the girls' own camera work sit alongside King's footage—unpolished, sometimes poorly framed—does something crucial: it's not about aesthetic control, it's about letting their vision and hers create friction, and that choice makes the whole thing breathe differently.