Just a Kid
2022 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Sharon McGowan
Genres: biography, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Ninety-two-year-old veteran John Boe recalls serving on a landing craft during the D-Day invasion on his twenty-first birthday and reflects on how the experience shaped his life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ninety-two-year-old D-Day vet riffing on his birthday and mortality—sounds like every PBS special ever made, except McGowan somehow finds the absurdist comedy lodged in the gap between historical weight and one man's wry acceptance of it all, which is exactly the kind of tonal tightrope most docs fall off.
McGowan situates this portrait within a rich documentary tradition of oral history and reflective aging, but the craftsmanship lies in how she lets silence and the 'darkly comic' tones breathe—this is disciplined curation of a life, not extraction of it.
The singular choice here is restraint: trusting an elderly subject's voice and presence enough to let the camera simply *stay*, which transforms what could've been a reverent war story into something far more intimate and strange.