War through children's eyes: documentaries about childhood and conflict

Children are the most persuasive witnesses a war film can find, and that is the problem. A child's face cuts through the maps, the casualty figures and the competing histories that leave an audience numb. It also cuts through the child's own defences, which are thinner than an adult's and harder to rebuild once a film has gone out into the world.

I have watched documentaries about childhood and conflict for most of my working life, and the good ones share a quality that is hard to name. They are curious about children as people rather than as symbols. The weaker ones use a small face the way a fundraising letter does, to close an argument the film has not made. What follows is a look at six films that taught me the difference, and at the safeguards I now expect from anyone who points a camera at a child in a war zone.

Why filmmakers go to children

Part of the reason is practical. Children are often present when adults have fled, been detained or been killed, and they notice things adults have trained themselves to ignore. They see a conflict from the height of a doorway. They also say things grown-ups will not: some repeat the slogans of their elders with frightening fluency, while others have not yet learned the official script and ask the obvious question everyone else stopped asking long ago.

The other reason is less flattering. Audiences trust children, and filmmakers know it. A child's grief does not need context to land, and a film can ride that response without earning it. The test I apply is simple. Does the film let the child complicate its argument, or does the child exist only to confirm it?

Promises: letting children argue

Promises (2001), made by B.Z. Goldberg with Justine Shapiro and Carlos Bolado, follows Israeli and Palestinian children in and around Jerusalem, and it was nominated for an Academy Award. What I admire most is its patience. The children live close together but grow up in separate worlds, and the film lets them speak at length in their own words, including words they have plainly absorbed from the adults around them. Some of what they say is tender. Some of it is hard to hear.

That patience is an ethical choice as much as an aesthetic one. It treats children as thinkers whose views deserve a full hearing, even when those views are frightening, and it asks more of the audience than a film of sad faces would. You leave with no tidy hope. You leave with a clear sense of how early a conflict takes root, and of how much of it children inherit before they can examine it.

Born into Brothels and the gift of a camera

Born into Brothels (2004), by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, follows children of sex workers in Kolkata who are given cameras, and it won the Academy Award for documentary feature. Handing children cameras is a powerful idea. It moves some of the authorship to them, and their photographs carry a directness no outsider's lens could manage.

Yet I have always felt a tension in the film. The children's images are the most alive thing in it, but the frame belongs to the adults who brought the cameras. The title names the children by the place they were born and, by extension, their mothers' work, a label they did not choose and will carry wherever the film is shown. None of this erases what the film achieves. It does show that a camera given is not the same as a film shared, and that one person's consent does not settle the question for everyone else in the household.

For Sama: a film addressed to a child

For Sama (2019), by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, reverses the usual direction. Instead of adults filming children for an audience, a mother films in Aleppo for her daughter, and the rest of us overhear. The film is framed as an address to Sama, a record of the city and of the life her mother lived there.

That framing changes the ethics in interesting ways. Sama was too young to agree to anything, yet the film is also an inheritance she will one day receive and judge. Al-Kateab is filming her own child, which gives her a claim to the material no visiting crew could have. It also places on her a burden visiting crews avoid: she has to live with every frame. I find the film almost unbearable in places, and I think it is right to be.

Children Underground and the limits of watching

Edet Belzberg's Children Underground (2001) watches street children in Bucharest, and it raises the hardest question observational cinema faces. The style depends on not intervening. The camera watches, the crew does not steer events, and the audience sees life as it unfolds. When the subjects are adults, that discipline can be a form of respect.

When the subjects are children in danger, non-intervention becomes a moral position the film has to defend. I do not know what happened off camera on that shoot, and a review is not the place to guess. But any film of this kind leaves a viewer wondering what the crew did when the camera stopped, and filmmakers working in these conditions owe the audience an answer, on screen or alongside the film. Silence on that point is itself a choice. It belongs on the list of questions to ask of any documentary, under who carries the risk.

Shelley Saywell's returns

Two films by the Canadian director Shelley Saywell approach children and war from opposite ends of a life. Martyr Street follows children of Hebron's Shuhada Street, and it is a follow-up to her earlier A Child's Century of War. Returning matters. A filmmaker who goes back to the same street is forced to reckon with what the first film meant, and the audience gets something rare: childhood in conflict as a process over time rather than a single image.

Kim's Story (1997) starts from the most famous single image of a child in war, the 1972 napalm photograph of Kim Phuc. That picture made a young girl into a symbol long before she could have any say in it. A documentary made with her as an adult does what the photograph never could: it lets the woman speak about the child. The classroom guide to the photograph on this site makes a good companion for anyone teaching the image, because it treats Kim Phuc as a person with a life beyond the frame.

What a child cannot agree to

Adults sign the release forms. Parents or guardians give consent, and in law that is usually enough. Ethically it is only the beginning. A ten-year-old who agrees to be filmed is agreeing on behalf of a thirty-year-old she has not met, one who may not want her worst year preserved and searchable for life.

Researchers who work with children distinguish between a guardian's consent and a child's assent, the child's own agreement in terms they understand. Documentary makers would do well to borrow the idea. A child who says no, or who goes quiet and turns away from the lens, has answered, whatever the parent signed. In a war zone there is a further danger. A recognizable face, a school name in the background or a street sign behind a shoulder can expose a family to reprisal long after the crew has flown home.

The life of a film after release raises its own questions. Documentaries now circulate for years online, cut into clips that travel without context, so a child's interview can be found by classmates, employers and anyone with a grudge. Festival premieres bring their own pressure. Putting a child subject on stage for a post-screening Q&A can be a gift, and it can also be one more performance demanded of someone who has already given a great deal. I would rather see filmmakers ask the child, privately and well in advance, and accept the answer.

Safeguards worth insisting on

These are the minimum standards I look for, whether I am reviewing a finished film or talking with someone about to shoot one. None of them requires a large budget. All of them require time.

Where to begin

If you watch only two of these films, pair For Sama with Kim's Story. One is made by a mother for a child too young to understand what is happening around her. The other is made with a woman who has spent her adult life answering for a photograph taken when she was a child. Watch them a week apart, then come back to the table above and ask which of its rows each film could answer for.