I Am Eleven presents children on the cusp of adulthood

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      A documentary by Genevieve Bailey. Rating unavailable.

      It’s no accident that Pixar’s hit Inside Out takes place in the mind of an 11-year-old girl. That’s the age that places humans right on the cusp between childhood and whoever they’re going to be, between powerlessness and agency.

      Australian video journalist Genevieve Bailey spent a lot of time talking to kids on her travels for other projects and ended up collecting six years’ worth of dialogues with 11-year-olds in more than a dozen countries.

      Bailey clearly has a gift for intimacy, as she has no trouble getting inside the homes and, you could say, heads of her subjects. She deftly edited her frequently inspiring, always entertaining footage to change locations and alternate exteriors and domestic settings. Although there are differences of climate, colour, and economic status, the children are remarkably similar in their concerns.

      The film is structured around views of family, religion, friendship, gender, romance, and the environment. Standout respondents include Grace, a soulfully sad-eyed British expat in Prague; Sharif, a talented rapper dealing with being Muslim in Sweden; Goh, a top-knotted Thai boy who trains elephants; Jamira, a half-Aboriginal girl in a Melbourne housing project; and Billy, an eccentric Cockney lad whose accent requires subtitles. Billy insists that he has extra bumps on the back of his head, “where the memories are kept”.

      Most show the streak of nostalgia common to kids of this age, and all have interesting views of their future, even if some, like a suburban girl from New Jersey and a bullied Bulgarian boy, are content with banal notions of predictable security. Some of the most at-risk subjects, including a bookish Berber girl in Morocco, and several girls at a surprisingly cheerful Indian orphanage, are the most optimistic.

      The least upbeat is Remi, a suave rural French boy who seems to be lighting metaphorical Gauloises as he shruggingly says things like “There’s another kind of love—for people you don’t know and will never meet. That’s a real love too.”

      I Am Eleven beautifully animates that point.

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