Why?
1995 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Bretislav Pojar
Genres: documentary, essay film, silent
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
In this wordless film, four children confront images of young people around the world whose hopes for the future are crushed by harsh circumstances, and they urgently appeal to adults to protect children's right to a future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pojar's doing the obvious thing here—wordless plea for child welfare, four kids staring at suffering—and it lands exactly where you'd expect it to. The film *knows* what it's saying and says it anyway, which is either restraint or capitulation depending on your mood.
A formally precise essay film that inherits the pedagogical rigor of 1990s NFB documentary practice; Pojar's use of silence and montage as argument, children as witness-surrogates, positions this squarely in a lineage of socially conscious cinema that trusts visual rhetoric over narration.
The decision to use children's faces as the sole narrator—their silent witness becoming the viewer's moral compass—is what transforms this from advocacy into something that actually *sits* with you; Pojar could have narrated or titled, but chose absence instead, and that single restraint does all the work.