Before They Are Six
1943 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Gudrun Parker
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tender
During the Second World War, mothers entering the workforce leave their toddlers at day nurseries where trained staff oversee meals, health, and play while teaching small children to care for themselves.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1943 NFB doc about childcare infrastructure during wartime sounds like pure propaganda, and it *is* — but Parker shoots it with such unguarded tenderness toward the kids that it becomes something subversive: a wartime film more interested in small bodies learning autonomy than in jingoism.
Parker's formal restraint here — the way she frames nursery routines as civic ceremony, letting duration and composition do the ideological work rather than narration — positions this squarely in the documentary tradition that treats the everyday as inherently significant, the kind of film that rewards slow looking.
What lifts this beyond institutional documentation is Parker's decision to hold on children's faces during moments of genuine concentration and play — not performing for camera, but absorbed — which reframes the entire premise from efficiency study into something about the small, radical act of being seen.