Far be it from me to claim being the ultimate authority on the subject, but when distinguishing between good and bad documentaries, so much popular consensus falls short. The subject matter and engaging “performances” by its subjects can do much to uphold otherwise mediocre filmmaking in the eyes of a prospective audience. Such is the case with Genevieve Bailey’s I Am Eleven, a lazy survey of (almost exclusively) precocious 11-year olds from around the world.
For this documentary that’s six years in the making, Bailey traveled the globe in her mid-twenties with the goal of making a film that was “energetic, optimistic, universal, and real,” which manifested as a series of interviews with preteen subjects living in the communities she visited. These include two boys, Jack and Goh (one white, one Thai) living at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand; Kim from the United States a Maori girl living with her single father in Australia; a gaggle of children living in a group home in India; the gregarious Billy from the United Kingdom; and others spanning 15 countries.
The film is pleasant enough as a facile anthropological exercise, though it reveals little insight. Bailey’s interview questions are pretty standard—we hear of the children’s likes, dislikes, their thoughts on someday getting married, what they want to be when they grow up, etc. These may have been instructive places to start, but follow-up questions rarely take the time to travel down the beaten path. Segments are edited thematically with boilerplate juxtapositions between affluent and poor subjects with no attempt to interrogate this class-based distinction. Comparisons will surely be drawn between this and Michael Apted’s Up series, but it’s closer to Babies: cute kids say the darndest things. The final minutes of I Am Eleven features the most interesting moments, in which Bailey follows up on her subjects a few years down the road, when they’ve come of age as teenagers. It is an Up film in microcosm: boys and girls turning into young men and women, with all the physical and emotional changes therein. But it takes nearly the entire runtime to get there, and doesn’t stick around long enough to say anything of real interest.
In an otherwise inoffensive, family-friendly vehicle, Bailey strikes an odd note right off the bat, explaining in voiceover that her motivation for making the film was prompted by depression, stemming from a car accident, her father’s death from cancer, and a newsroom job that required being confronted with images of horror and suffering (this would have been around the time of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004). This type of self-reflexivity in documentaries ostensibly about other subjects (Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I and Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March spring to mind) is not unheard of, and can indeed elevate a film into the realm of insightful meta-critique. But Bailey never returns to address this opening monologue, making one wonder why she brings it up in the first place. As it stands, the comments color the entire affair as a vanity project, in which an English-speaking white woman “finds herself” by exploring exotic cultures—Apted’s Up by way of Eat, Pray, Love.
