Boys Will Be Men
1980 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Donald Rennick
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Boys as young as ten on Montréal's streets talk candidly about their lives of crime, what matters to them, and the futures they hope for.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
1980 vérité documentary about street kids in Montreal sounds like it should be exploitative noise, but Rennick refuses the usual uplift narrative — these boys aren't tragic props, they're just talking, which somehow makes the whole thing more unsettling and real than any moralizing could.
A formally disciplined work of direct cinema that sits squarely in the NFB's documentary lineage while resisting sentimentality; the restraint in letting subjects speak without editorial hand-wringing marks it as rigorous interrogation of a community rather than spectacle.
The singular choice here is letting ten-year-olds articulate their own futures without intervention — no narrator cushioning the frame, no scored manipulation — and that naked access to their voices becomes the entire film's architecture.