Feeling Yes, Feeling No
1984 · 43m · Canada
Directed by Moira Simpson
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Young children learn to trust Yes and No feelings and to assess risky situations with strangers or trusted adults. The three-part program builds self-worth and practical skills to prevent sexual assault.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A PSA about consent that doesn't condescend—Simpson trusts kids to sit with ambiguity instead of screaming answers at them, which is genuinely weird for 1984 and makes it feel less like propaganda and more like actual cinema.
This film inherits the pedagogical documentary tradition while refusing its didactic impulse; the formal restraint—letting silence and a child's hesitation do the moral work—places it in conversation with the best of NFB's social documentary lineage.
The decision to intercut children's actual responses and uncertainties rather than stage-manage their understanding creates an almost unbearable authenticity that no script revision could have manufactured.