The charity that teaches underprivileged kids to humanely hunt their next meal

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.