Children of War
1986 · 25m · Canada
Directed by Premika Ratnam
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Teenagers from conflict zones in Central America, southern Africa, and Northern Ireland join a 1985 peace tour, exchanging accounts of violence with Canadian high school students.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a war doc to either sensationalize or sanctify; Ratnam just lets teenagers talk across impossible divides and watches the whole tidy narrative fall apart—which is braver than any formal provocation.
This 1985 peace tour becomes a perfect case study in documentary restraint: Ratnam's refusal to editorialise, her commitment to cross-cutting voices as structural argument rather than emotional manipulation, places it squarely in the tradition of engaged documentary that trusts form over rhetoric.
The film's entire architecture hinges on Ratnam's decision to hold equal weight on each voice without hierarchy—a technical and ethical choice that transforms what could've been activist messaging into something that actually breathes room for complexity.