Children of Soldiers
2010 · 51m · Canada
Directed by Claire Corriveau
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Children and teenagers at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa discuss having soldier parents during a deployment to Afghanistan, balancing pride in the troops with their own needs.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent slice-of-life doc, sure, but it plays the expected hand—kids worry, soldiers deploy, everyone's proud and conflicted in exactly the ways you'd predict. Where's the wrinkle that makes you rethink the whole thing?
Corriveau's restraint is the real craft here: she lets the children speak without editorial flourish, trusts long silences and overlapping voices to build emotional complexity, and the film's formal quietness echoes a documentary lineage that knows when *not* to sentimentalize—this is rigorous emotional portraiture.
The decision to layer multiple kids' voices without clear attribution—letting them blur together into a collective testimony rather than isolated case studies—is what elevates this from earnest observation into something that actually captures what it feels like to be part of a military family's distributed grief.