Boys and Girls (1983)

Directed by

Don McBrearty

Genre

drama, family

Country

Canada

Runtime

22 min

Rating

5.5 of 10 from 10 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A girl grows up on a Canadian farm in the 1940s, helping her father with fox pelts while her brother Laird is given different tasks. Her mother and other women pressure her to accept a domestic role, showing how she is pushed toward becoming only a girl in a world that limits her.

quietmelancholicthoughtfulslow-pacedatmosphericrestrainedsomberevocative

What happens

Boys and Girls is a 1983 Canadian short film directed by Don McBrearty. The film won an Oscar in 1984 for Best Short Subject. Boys and Girls is based on Alice Munro's short story of the same name, written in 1968. It is a coming of age story about a girl growing up on a farm having to accept that in her lifetime she will always be considered "only a girl". In this film, it emphasizes the almost invisible social forces shaping children. In this case, the girl and her brother Laird become gendered adults. As farmers, fathers plant wild animals for consumption. Also in the movie, the dark, sweltering, suffocating kitchen imprisons the girl's mother and threatens to imprison her. The town itself and the remote farms are conceived in an unavoidable enclosure. The father controls a specific space in the home. When he was not working outdoors, he performed activities in the cellar. This was a white room and was illuminated by a hundred-watt light bulbs. In addition, the bright light that illuminates the space also reflects the father's desire to control. The girl helped her father water the fox and helped her father do other work. In the movie, female family members begin to force girls. Efforts to limit her behavior occur at every level of existence. For example, her grandmother tells her that "girls won't do tricks like this" (controls her movements through space) "girls put their knees together when they sit down" (controls the body). In addition, her boy said that he was useful because he was a boy. Men are more important than women. In this film, masculinity is more important than femininity. "Female in the film" narrows the theme of the film in a sense, and at the same time expands the scope of the film, including feminism, women's movement and women's issues. The study of women in films occupies a wide and still growing space between film and feminist studies or general studies of women's studies. The history of women in the film is as long as film production. Women participated in the film from the beginning (1896), although feminist film studies started relatively late. From the early days of the late 1960s to the present, the development of feminist film criticism is not only the development of many of its theories, but also attempts to remain in the "mainstream". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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