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Growing Up

Growing Up

A bittersweet collection of documentaries and a few fiction films on a wide range of childhoods and childhood experiences around the world, from the adventures and idylls of growing up, to coping with personal challenges, and facing terrible tragedies.

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Growing Up
  • Ray & Liz

    Directed by Richard Billingham • Drama • With Patrick Romer, Richard Ashton, Justin Salinger • 2018 • 107 minutes

    On the outskirts of Birmingham and the margins of society, the Billingham family perform extreme rituals and break social taboos as they muddle through a life decided by factors beyo...

  • Casa Grande

    Directed by Fellipe Barbosa • Drama • With Marcello Novaes, Suzana Pires, Thales Cavalcanti • 2014 • 115 minutes

    Jean Cavalcanti attends a well reguarded private boys' school. He lives a carefree life of moderate privilege in a gated, custom built house in an affluent neighborhood in suburban Ri...

  • Scheme Birds

    Directed by Ellen Fiske, Ellinor Hallin • Documentary • 2019 • 86 minutes

    The story of Gemma, a teenage troublemaker, growing up in a world of pigeons and violence. From childhood to motherhood, her life unfolds as innocent games turn towards serious crime. Directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hall...

  • Sexy Baby

    Directed by Jill Bauer, Ronna Gradus • Documentary • 2012 • 83 minutes

    These days, sex doesn't just sell, it saturates our culture. In the age of runaway social media and "sexting," raunchy rap songs on pop radio and hardcore pornography at the click of a mouse—what's it like to be a woman? A gi...

  • Lore

    Directed by Cate Shortland • Drama • With Saskia Rosendahl • 2013 • 108 minutes

    Left to fend for themselves after their SS officer father and mother, staunch Nazi believers, are interred by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II, five German children undertake a harrowing journey that ...

  • We Go Way Back

    Directed by Lynn Shelton • Drama • With Amber Hubert, Maggie Brown, Kate Bayley • 2006 • 79 minutes

    Lynn Shelton's debut feature draws on her past as a stage actress but WE GO WAY BACK is no autobiographical drama. Kate (Amber Hubert) is a struggling actress who has given up her happiness and he...

  • The Inheritors

    Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2009 • 90 minutes

    The most highly praised and awarded Mexican documentary in many years, THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky immerses us in the daily lives of children who, with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor.

    The film takes...

  • Les Enfants Terribles

    Directed by Ahmet Necdet Çupur • Documentary • 2021 • 93 minutes

    Twenty years ago, Ahmet Necdet Çupur left his village in south-eastern Turkey, against his parents wishes. Now, he is back. But this time as a filmmaker documenting his siblings’ struggles against the same oppressive family culture...

  • We Need to Talk About Kevin

    Directed by Lynne Ramsay • Drama • With Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller • 2010 • 112 minutes

    A suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, Lynne Ramsay’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN explores the fractious relationship between a mother and her evil son. Tilda Swinton, in a bracing...

  • Best Kept Secret

    Directed by Samantha Buck • Documentary • With Janet Mino, Alyce Barnhardt, Robert Caspar, Johnson Green, Carla Byrd, Matthew McNabb • 2012 • 85 minutes

    Janet Mino has taught her class of students with autism for four years. When they graduate in spring 2012, they will leave the security of the ...

  • We Are the Lambeth Boys (Karel Reisz)

    Directed by Karel Reisz • Documentary • With John Rollason, Thomas Ahearne, Patrick Ahearne • 1959 • 53 minutes

    Karel Reisz’s honest and sympathetic depiction of South London teens aimed to challenge the media perception of ‘Teddy Boys’, and would be one of the last films to appear under the Fre...

  • Resistance is Life

    Directed by Apo W. Bazidi • Documentary • 2017 • 73 minutes

    From a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border, an 8-year-old girl named Evlin characterizes the resilience of her hometown of Kobane against ISIS militants. In the midst of the tragic war in Syria, Evlin's story provides hope.

  • Bluebeard (Kékszakállú)

    Directed by Gastón Solnicki • Drama • With Laila Maltz, Lara Tarlowski,
    Katia Szechtman • 2016 • 72 minutes

    Hailed as "an eerie high-modernist fable... mightily minimalist, and drop-dead gorgeous" (Film Comment), Kékszakállú is a beguiling portrait of several young women at the threshold of adu...

  • Adama

    Directed by Simon Rouby • Animation • 2020 • 82 minutes

    ADAMA is a modern and universal story, the coming-of-age tale of a young African boy searching for his brother, just as a new world is about to emerge from the chaos of war.

    12-year-old Adama lives in a remote West African village. Beyond ...

  • Miss Kiet's Children

    Directed by Petra Lataster-Czisch & Peter Lataster • Documentary • 2016 • 113 minutes

    Kiet Engels is the kind of teacher one wishes every schoolchild could have. She is strict but never harsh. She is loving but never soft. Her patience in endless.

    Many of Miss Kiet's pupils are refugees who hav...

  • On the Way to School

    Directed by Pascal Plisson • Documentary • 2013 • 77 minutes

    They live in all four corners of the planet and share a thirst for knowledge. Almost instinctively, they know that their wellbeing (indeed, their survival) depend on knowledge and education. From the dangerous savannahs of Kenya to the...

  • School of Babel

    Directed by Julie Bertuccelli • Documentary • 2013 • 89 minutes

    Welcome to one Parisian school's program for newly arrived immigrant children from all over the world. At 'La Grange aux Belles' school in the diverse 10th district of Paris has a program for newly arrived immigrant children that pr...

  • The Intolerable Burden

    Directed by Chea Prince • Documentary • 2003 • 56 minutes

    In the autumn of 1965, sharecroppers Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter enrolled the youngest eight of their thirteen children in the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. Their decision to send the children to the formerly all white schools wa...

  • Small Wonders

    Directed by Allan Miller • Documentary • 1995 • 77 minutes

    This inspirational documentary deservedly earned a 1995 Academy Award nomination. Divorced mother Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras taught music in the New York City school system until the budget ax eliminated her job. Dedicated to music and he...

  • Oblivion

    Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2008 • 93 minutes

    The latest documentary from Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) focuses on Peru's capital city of Lima.

    OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys...

  • The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street

    Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes

    209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...

  • As a Young Girl of Thirteen...

    Directed by Elisabeth Coronel, Florence Gaillard & Arnaud de Mezamat • Documentary • With Simone Lagrange • 2009 • 88 minutes

    In AS A YOUNG GIRL OF 13, Holocaust survivor Simone Lagrange recounts in detail her life before the war, her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her role in bringing N...

  • Love & Diane

    Directed by Jennifer Dworkin • Documentary • 2003 • 155 minutes

    Jennifer Dworkin’s groundbreaking documentary LOVE & DIANE presents a searingly honest and moving examination of poverty, welfare and drug rehabilitation in the United States today. Filmed in New York City over a five-year period, D...

  • Children of Mandala

    Directed by Anand Patwardhan • Documentary • 2009 • 5 minutes

    A message from the economically displaced children of a slum colony in Mumbai who are educating themselves in the face of government apathy.