Everybody's Children
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Everybody's Children
Premiering: Tuesday August 25, 2009 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld
Everybody's Children is an eloquent portrait of a year in the lives of two African youth seeking asylum in Canada: Joyce and Sallieu. One fleeing the French-speaking Democratic Republic of Congo and the other, Sierra Leone, they arrive at ages 17 and 16, traumatized and alone in a country completely alien to them.
On the outside, they seem like your typical teenagers trying to balance the pressures of fitting in and being normal. Vibrant Joyce likes to sing and play guitar, but she left home to avoid being forced into prostitution by her father. Reserved Sallieu wants to buy a car and become a firefighter but escaped his homeland after witnessing the murder of his mother.
There is little government support in place for their care after arriving. With no parents or family to nurture them, it is a handful of individuals who make a real difference in the day-to-day lives of these children. People like pastors Alain and Alice Suamunu-Luasu of the Salvation Army and Anne Woolger-Bell of Matthew House, a shelter in central Toronto for newly arrived refugee claimants, offer them much-needed guidance and a sense of community.
The exact number of unaccompanied refugee minors landing in Canadian airports every year remains unknown. Director Monika Delmos calls on Canadians everywhere to embrace Joyce and Sallieu and others like them as children of us all. Everybody's Children is the winner of the 2006 Reel Diversity Competition, a National Film Board of Canada initiative in partnership with CBC and CBC Newsworld.
