Tomorrow's Citizens
1947 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Gordon Weisenborn
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
This postwar film questions whether children's education in social responsibility is keeping pace with their technical knowledge in an age of powerful new natural energies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1947 essay film interrogating the gap between technical mastery and moral education feels like it should be didactic tedium, but Weisenborn actually resists the sermon—he lets the tension *sit*, which is rare enough in postwar civics cinema that it's genuinely unsettling.
Weisenborn positions this squarely in the lineage of the NFB's social-documentary essay tradition, and the formal restraint—asking the hard question about responsibility without answering it—marks the film as aware of its own moment and enduring argument.
The decisive move here is structural: by framing the problem through children's hands rather than adults' voices, Weisenborn shifts the entire weight of the question onto the viewer, a subtle editorial choice that transforms what could have been a pamphlet into something that actually *thinks*.