Set against the backdrop of his son’s first five years of life—from cooing infant to hurricane of a boy—filmmaker Justin Simms looks at modern masculinity through the lens of fatherhood as he asks an increasingly urgent question: How do we teach our boys to be better men?

How do we teach our boys to become better men?

It’s a boy!  

March 2016. Justin Simms becomes 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 he 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.

How can fathers steer sons away from negative models of masculinity and help them become caring adults? What does it even mean to be a “good man”? Isn’t it enough to nurture basic human qualities—empathy, confidence, common decency—without dwelling on gender?

Anchoring his enquiry in his home turf, a vibrant neighbourhood in downtown St. John’s, Simms 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.

When I pulled out my phone to take the first video of my son, Jude, breathing his first breaths on his mother’s chest in the operating room, I did not know I was shooting the first shot in what would become a years-long process of making this documentary.

Sons is a film born out of love and fear. Love for my son, Jude, of course, who’s now eight, but also fear of the world he’s being put into, and fear of my ability to prepare him for it.

As Jude grew from infant to little boy, this love and fear were irreparably intertwined, as Trump-ism and rising nationalism gave way to a chilling debate around masculinity, where we saw boys and men fall further into a hole of isolation and resentment, with the culture and the political and educational systems regularly failing them.

This made the prospect of being a father to a little white boy, born into middle-class privilege, all the more daunting. 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?

My thoughts on this subject were driven by the idea that masculinity is a kind of chain. Something that links us not only to our fathers, but also to a set of ideals that may or may not have relevance anymore. Ideals that many of us still labour beneath.

There is a conversation missing around masculinity. And that’s men talking to other men about breaking this chain. We need a deeper, inward-looking dialogue around masculinity, a dialogue removed from the “toxic-or-not-toxic” binary. Where men get to express a range of emotions, where vulnerability is embraced rather than shamed. If we could see more men being open around these issues (myself included), it would speak to the many men in the world who are, up to now, ill-equipped to have these dialogues—with themselves or others.

I felt that the only way to examine this was to look at my own life. This started with conversations with my father, Randy, 69, a well-known broadcaster in Newfoundland. He is a child of the sixties and a product of a rigid value system implemented by his father, Waldo. I asked my father about how he modelled manhood for me, the big moments in my youth where his values were absorbed or rejected by me, and how fatherhood and parenting have changed since he was exactly where I am—father to an only child with a stutter.

To deepen the conversation, I reached out to other dads in my community, friends of mine with their own stories about their journeys from son to father and how their own experiences influence their parenting styles. The times that they came through, the times they failed and how they themselves work through these issues.

This is a deeply personal, hand-crafted film. There is no fourth wall. I allowed the camera to burrow into my home, my family, my friends and my brain as I wrestled with this subject. I wanted Sons to be confessional, personal and centred on my own experiences. I was influenced by a wide range of films, from the work of great essayist filmmaker Alan Berliner to searingly personal films like Chantal Akerman’s News from Home and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.

My hope is that Sons will resonate as a unique expression of both the love and fear a father can have for his son and the complex world they both find themselves in.   

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