Coming to theatres today, Friday, September 12: I AM ELEVEN
Genevieve Bailey’s exploration of the world from the perspective of pre-adolescents bowed at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2011, where it won an audience award. It has screened extensively since, making stops at Newport Beach, Cleveland, Stockholm, Montclair, Sao Paulo, and at several children’s fests.
As she explains at the outset of her film, Bailey, faced with a particularly difficult period in her life, looked backward to when she was eleven years old, a time when life was full of possibility and not yet tempered by the jadedness of adolescence. Taking inspiration and perhaps using it as a form of therapy, she set out on a trip around the world, visiting fifteen countries and interviewing countless tweens on a wide variety of topics, from love to racism, the environment to the future. Speaking directly to her camera, responses from more than 20 of these kids are assembled here. While some of the eleven-year-olds are memorable (notably the possibly autistic Billy), many of them, at the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, simply are not. There are just too many of them, offering too many essentially similar comments, in what ultimately feels like an extended vox pop segment. It’s understandable that festival audiences have embraced Bailey’s film – despite some early comments on bullying, it’s relentlessly feel-good and ultimately harmless – but at its heart it’s an overlong survey that offers the viewer little opportunity to truly connect with its parade of subjects – and I’m generally not a fan of survey approaches. Very late in the film – too late, with less than 10 minutes left – Bailey revisits a handful of the kids at a variety of older ages to demonstrate how quickly they’ve changed as adolescence colors their perceptions. It’s this brief sequence that seems to have led some viewers to make inapt comparisons to Michael Apted’s UP series. Perhaps if Bailey’s film had narrowed its perspective to far fewer subjects and instead allotted more time a to revisit them later in life, the reference could be justified, and might have yielded something more revelatory than what’s here – an acceptable, family-friendly documentary that offers surface insight into the experiences of preteens, but no real surprises.
what (not) to doc 