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The San Antonio metropolitan region is one of the highest-poverty areas in the United States. Roughly one in four children living there experiences hunger. The short documentary Kids Game follows a hunting outing led by the charity City Kids Adventures, which offers outdoor excursions to underprivileged and at-risk San Antonio youth. Capturing the participants in a nonintrusive verité style, the Belgian-born, US-based director Michiel Thomas skilfully tracks the action with a nonjudgmental eye, bringing evenhandedness to a scene – kids holding large guns, learning to kill – that could easily be misconstrued or politicised. Instead, Thomas invites the viewer to draw out and interrogate their own reactions, whether it’s alarm at the image of kids shooting animals, warmth at the teachers’ focus on ethics and growth, frustration at the children’s food poverty despite their country’s vast wealth, or perhaps more likely, some incongruous combination thereof.
Director: Michiel Thomas
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History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes
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Biology
Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings
3 minutes
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Anthropology
Does Mogi’s future lie with her horses on the Mongolian steppe, or in the city?
16 minutes
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Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes
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Art
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes
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Personality
A ‘dumpster archeologist’ reconstructs strangers’ stories via what they’ve discarded
14 minutes
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Human rights and justice
An unarmed Indigenous group aims to protect their native lands in this stirring portrait
15 minutes
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Art
In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved
9 minutes
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Ageing and death
We’re not the only animals that appear to grieve. What are the implications?
6 minutes