Grace, Milly, Lucy... Child Soldiers (Classroom Length)
2010 · 51m · Canada
Directed by Raymonde Provencher
Genres: biography, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Former Ugandan girl soldiers Grace, Milly, and Lucy, abducted and trained to kill, try to rebuild ordinary lives and break the silence around their generation. Their dreams anchor a search for restored meaning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a war documentary to either explode with rage or collapse into trauma porn—Provencher does neither, and that refusal to perform outrage actually feels more subversive than any formal trick could be.
This sits in genuine lineage with the essay-documentary tradition—the way dreams function as formal architecture, the restraint in not over-explaining, the deliberate pacing that trusts silence as compositional choice—it's the kind of film that reshapes how you think about testimony in nonfiction.
The decision to anchor the narrative in the girls' articulated dreams rather than their trauma is the hinge everything turns on; it's a single conceptual move that reframes survival as imagination instead of endurance.