Growing Up Canadian: Work
2003 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Susan Terrill
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Children work six days in factories, serve Dairy Queen sundaes, knit for unknown soldiers, and endure cheap bosses, firings, coal mines, and fishing dories. Recollections show how families and the wartime nation depended on young labour.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A well-meaning oral history that plays it frustratingly straight—kids talking about factory shifts and coal mines, all presented with the reverence of a heritage minute. The premise wants to subvert nostalgia but doesn't have the nerve; it's too comfortable in its own earnestness.
Terrill understands the documentary tradition of witness testimony and how to layer memory across time; the film sits confidently in the lineage of social history cinema, letting children's voices accumulate into something that feels both intimate and archive-worthy. The structural choice to let wartime labour speak through recollection rather than didacticism shows formal restraint.
The decision to trust children's own narration—unfiltered, sometimes halting—over authoritative voiceover is what makes this work; it's a small technical choice that transforms archival material into something that *feels* like lived history rather than recovered fact.