Of Hopscotch and Little Girls...
1999 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Marquise Lepage
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Girls aged eight to fourteen in India, Thailand, Yemen, Peru, Burkina Faso and Haiti talk about hopscotch, school and their hopes, while describing how poverty and abuse have stolen parts of their childhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the trauma doc to wallow—Lepage refuses, letting kids talk hopscotch alongside heartbreak, which feels almost perverse in its refusal to perform grief for the camera.
A formally restrained portrait that trusts ellipsis and montage over explanation; the film's lineage runs through cinema-vérité toward a contemplative documentary tradition that privileges presence over interpretation.
The decision to anchor each girl's testimony to a single, repeated physical gesture—the game itself, enacted—transforms what could be extractive into something reciprocal and dignifying.