Child, Part 5: 4 Years - 6 Years
1978 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Robert Humble
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Curious four-to-six-year-olds ask endless questions, handle animals and learn to face fears alongside peers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A observational doc about kids being kids—yeah, yeah, we've all seen this before, the cinema-vérité children's-wonder routine. But Humble resists the urge to sentimentalize or score it, which almost makes it worth the contrarian's grudging nod.
Humble's *Child* series is a deliberate act of curation within documentary practice itself, and this fifth installment sustains a formal restraint that honors both the Griersonian tradition and the intimate phenomenology of early childhood—the kind of measured observation that requires real conviction to maintain across 27 minutes.
What holds this together isn't the premise—it's Humble's decision to let the children's voices remain unmediated and often incomprehensible, a refusal to impose narrative that transforms what could be sentimental into something genuinely unsettling and real.