Children in Progress

“My children are my pride and joy”. This is what parents usually say to show their attachment to their offspring. The grammar of this sentence reveals a strange relationship which is commonly accepted. Can’t children be considered independently from their parents? No moral issue is going to be raised here, but such a possessive statement questions the status of children and has consequences for any aesthetic portrayal, as two films in the IDFA programme illustrate. You Don’t Like the Truth - Four Days in Guantanamo introduces Omar Khader, a fifteen-year-old Canadian boy with Afghani origins who has been charged with a war crime. In Marathon Boy, the main character is six-year-old Budhia, who has already run marathons. His tiny little legs supported more than six hours of running, and he won every single race.

The definition of the term ’child’ itself is not clear. It can refer either to a person’s position within the family or to their age. The latter is again a compromise between “birth and full growth”, as it is written in the dictionary. Mainly, ’child’ is defined through its vagueness and lack of determination. That is why these two films raise questions about the representation of the children’s bodies.

After detention in Bagram where he underwent torture, teenager Omar Khader is transferred to Guantanamo Bay to be interrogated by Canadian secret services. You Don’t Like the Truth is entirely compiled of security camera footage of the four-day interrogation. The blurred images erase the specificities of the face so that Omar becomes anonymous - children are not supposed to have an identity. Omar’s body has also become an abstraction. Traces of his corporal punishment are left: a hole crosses his red and blue chest; his left arm is unable to move. Children are close to the indeterminate nature of monsters when it comes to proportions. In Marathon Boy, Budhia’s non-expressive face contrasts with the activity of his lower body. His eyes share no feelings; his mouth only opens while he breathes. His inner determination makes his face indeterminate. There lies the tension between the youth of the exterior and the extreme maturity of the will.

This tension is also present in the surprisingly clever Omar Khader. He has suffered from the most horrible treatment for having shown exceptional resistance to the US army’s demands. Face to face with intelligence services, he tries tricks to confound them. He perfectly understands his situation and what will help or destroy him. His intelligence led the American Services to confuse the boy with his supposedly terrorist father, for whose guilt Omar becomes a substitute.

The importance these children are given is totally out of proportion considering their age. Omar’s spectacular willpower breaks the boundaries between what is expected of childhood - total intellectual dependence - and the individuality he actually shows. Budhia is raised to the level of a national hero being trained for the Olympic Games. He becomes the big hope of a nation before reaching even ten years of age, and fulfils more than his coach could ever have expected from himself.

Children are flexible in their bodies, whose boundaries are not limited yet, and in their minds, as they can be influenced more easily. Their abstraction makes any re-figuration possible. Canadian interrogators insist on the sadness of Omar’s mother to break him; Budhia’s coach uses all the trust he is given to encourage the child to run another race right after hours of running. As a result, the narration follows the mutations of the children, and turns the fairy tale of childhood into an adult nightmare.

By Viviane Saglier