Come On Children

In the early 1970s, Allan King organized his own hippie commune, recruited ten suburban teenagers (five boys and five girls) to live in it free from parental supervision, and filmed the results. Come On Children offers a perceptive, provocative and surprising portrait of adolescence at a time of seismic social, cultural and countercultural change. Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film places this lesser-known King gem alongside landmarks Warrendale and A Married Couple as  "three genre busting, ethically unsettling, fly-on-the-wall observational films" in which the director pioneered his "actuality dramas."   "Tucked away in a rural commune, free from their parents’ or anyone else’s judgment of them, the aspiring hippies fall into a kind of hostile lethargy. They protest their oppression, sing about their angst and do almost nothing. Dishes and half-eaten food pile up in the kitchen. Parents visit, disapprove, leave. Nobody cares; everyone is more intent on getting stoned. The overall impression left by these rather wilted flower children is that their generation may have been grossly overhyped. Come On Children never received full theatrical release, so has become King’s least-seen yet most discussed actuality drama" (Seth Feldman, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 94 mins.