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11 is a weird age in life. You’ve spent nearly half your life in school (with at least seven more years to go!), and you’re starting to learn more things about the world, but you’re not quite at the age where you truly know anything. As for personal growth, it’s just on the cusp of puberty, which is its own beast in and of itself. 11, essentially, is the crossroads between child and teenager, past and future, and it’s exciting and scary at the same time in the best way all manners of dichotomy are.
In I Am Eleven, director Genevieve Bailey spotlights a handful of 11-year-old children from 15 countries across the world, delving into what it’s like to be 11 in this modern age. I Am Eleven will be playing in select New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco theaters this September with planned theatrical releases in Chicago, Boston, DC, and other cities to follow. You can read the documentary’s official synopsis below:
Do you remember when you were 11? Australian filmmaker Genevieve Bailey travelled the world for six years talking with 11-year-olds to compose this insightful, funny and moving portrait of childhood. From an orphanage in India to a single-parent household in inner-city Melbourne, to bathing with elephants in Thailand, IAM ELEVEN explores the lives and thoughts of children from all around the world. It weaves together deeply personal and at times hilarious portraits of what it means to stand on the cusp between childhood and adolescence, that fleeting moment when childish naiveté has faded, yet teenaged self-consciousness has not yet taken hold. These young minds, still unguarded and remarkably honest, offer a powerful insight into the future of our world.
As straight up and personal as the ’7 Up’ series, and with the comedy and honesty of ‘Spellbound’, this documentary enables us to explore an age where these ‘not quite kids, not quite teenagers’ briefly linger, between the frank openness and sometimes naivety of childhood, and the sharp and surprisingly brave wisdom and knowing of adulthood. As much as it is a story about them, it is a story with them, of what it is like to be eleven today.