Synopsis
This feature documentary poses the problem of child-rearing in our competitive society. While helping children develop their talents, encouraging them in their passions, whether it be field hockey, gymnastics or piano, parents and coaches seek, more or less consciously, to make them live their own need for competition and their own dreams by proxy. The children confide to the camera on this subject.
A word from Tënk
A psychoeducator by training, André Melançon has trained his camera on youth from his very first films. After having written and filmed three fictional shorts for young audiences, he moved on to documentaries, creating this exceptional piece. Surrounded by parents who see their children as future Olympic gymnasts, future NHL hockey players, future concert pianists, the filmmaker instead hands the microphone to the young people themselves, creating a striking meditation on the phenomenon of parents who attempt to live out their dreams and ambitions vicariously through their children. He would later track down these subjects thirty years later, in his follow-up to Les Vrais perdants, 2007’s L’âge de passion.
Marc St-Pierre
Curator of Collection, NFB
