This film has a very serious case of the camera game. Gil! You’re occasionally pretty obvious in the way you play to the camera!
That’s a real documentary issue, and fair to mention. But then, it’s such a tiny thing! Especially compared to how very, how incalculably important this small film is. Foster Child is the reason for public broadcasting, and special subsidies for the underrepresented. It is reason and justification both. How else would these stories get told, and disseminated? And what would we, what would free and just democratic societies be without them?
The Market has no interest in a lot of the things that need doing. Some Market advocates go on to say that those things must not have been worthwhile, or else someone would have stepped up to produce and pay for them. That covers films like this. And their subject?
Some people like to assume that every beneficiary of any kind of social assistance is on the make. There has been waste (definitely!) in the administration of these programs, and so those people are offended. “Let them die,” they say, “and decrease the surplus population.” Well, if those things are true then what do we do about the maker and subject of this film—who just so happens to be Métis—who tells so clearly about his journey from near-fatal neglect to exemplary manhood?
This next is for me to hear too, and be reproved by. Hey, rich person. It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.