December 19, 2024 – Montreal – National Film Board of Canada
How do we teach our boys to become better men?
Newfoundland director Justin Simms tries to answer this vital question throughout his National Film Board of Canada (NFB) feature documentary Sons, which premieres January 20 on nfb.ca and the NFB’s streaming platform for smart TVs.
Set against the backdrop of his son’s first five years of life—from cooing infant to hurricane of a boy—Simms looks at modern masculinity through the lens of fatherhood in his deeply personal 70-minute documentary.
Community screenings
The NFB will also present Sons at community screenings in Toronto and Vancouver supported by Next Gen Men, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to creating a future where boys and men experience less pain and cause less harm by changing how the world sees, acts and thinks about masculinity.
- Saturday, January 18, at 2 p.m., The Cinematheque, Vancouver
- Followed by a discussion with Next Gen Men executive director Jake Stika
- Ticket link
- Thursday, January 23, at 7 p.m., CSI Spadina, suite 101, Toronto
- Followed by a discussion with Justin Simms and Next Gen Men director of programs Jonathon Reed
- Ticket link
More about the film
Produced by Liz Cowie and Rohan Fernando
Executive producers: Rohan Fernando, Annette Clarke, Nathalie Cloutier and John Christou
Press kit: mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/sons
It’s a boy!
It’s March 2016 and St. John’s filmmaker Justin Simms has just become a dad.
But his joy is tinged with unease.
Little Jude enters the world at a time when traditional notions of masculinity are being contested as never before. How can Simms teach his boy to be a good man?
With Sons, eight eventful years in the making, the Newfoundland-based filmmaker confronts the challenge with imagination and creative flair, crafting a big-hearted documentary essay on parenting, patriarchy—and the pain and pleasure of guiding boys through the turbulent cultural waters of the early 21st century. Woven throughout is luminous informal footage of Jude’s early years, charting his trajectory from helpless newborn to hurricane of a boy, obsessed with dinosaurs and superheroes.
Anchoring his enquiry in his home turf, a vibrant neighbourhood in downtown St. John’s, Justin enlists the help of family, friends and an engaging gang of fellow dads, all grappling with the challenge of parenting boys. “Masculinity can be beautiful,” observes one participant, “but it needs a new story now.”
Making inventive use of archival imagery, Simms evokes a traditional maritime culture where men frequently were separated from their families, and in a series of soul-bearing conversations with his own father, he explores how “masculinity” can always be questioned, always be reimagined.
Quotes
“I began to be haunted by the question, How do we lose so many of our boys to the dark side of masculinity? And perhaps a more important question: What can I do as a father to better model the kind of behaviour and empathetic worldview that I so wish for Jude and his cohort to absorb?”
–Justin Simms
“Every dad hopes his son makes a better father than he did. Sons offers a touching, personal, and introspective work that uses one filmmaker’s vulnerability to mine a question many people need to answer.”
–Pat Mullen, POV magazine
About the filmmaker
Justin Simms is a Newfoundland and Labrador filmmaker whose first feature film, Down to the Dirt, received the best Atlantic feature and best screenplay awards at the Atlantic Film Festival. His feature film adaptation Away from Everywhere (2016), based on the Chad Pelley novel of the same name, had its world premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival as part of Telefilm Canada’s Perspectives Canada program. His non-fiction credits include Hard Light (2011), Danny (2014) and the short Hand.Line.Cod (2016), which premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
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French version here | Version française ici.