Every Child
1979 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Eugene Fedorenko
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An unwanted baby is passed from household to household until two homeless men take him in and care for him. The Oscar-winning animation illustrates the right of every child to a name and nationality for UNESCO's Year of the Child.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A UNESCO mandate turned into earnest fable—the premise wants to lecture you about children's rights, but Fedorenko somehow smuggles in real melancholy instead of propaganda, which almost works despite the film's best efforts to be the opposite of subversive.
A canonical NFB work that knows exactly what it is: animation in service of formal restraint and moral clarity, where the accumulation of small domestic moments becomes an argument about dignity—this is how you make a message film that respects both the form and the viewer.
The decision to animate the baby as featureless and still while the world moves around him—a technical constraint that becomes the entire emotional engine—transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely haunting with a minimal palette.