When We Were Bullies (2021)

A mind-boggling coincidence leads the filmmaker to track down his fifth grade class and fifth grade teacher to examine their memory of and complicity in a bullying incident 50 years ago.I was really looking forward to this film: I was bullied as a kid, especially at the same age as the characters, and wondered if there might be some kind of self-reflection, atonement, peacemaking. Instead, this guy made not only one-a film with burning ants in the title!?-but two films that depict the traumatizing, violent incident. Then, in the second, he permits about a dozen of his classmates to talk about how weird and unlikeable the bullied kid was. I felt very happy for him at first-a successful television exec-and then I wondered whether the filmmaker was annoyed that he hadn’t replied to the burning ants DVD. And then the sociopathic nonagenarian teacher, who says that girls are catty, that boys are very easy to get along with as long as you throw a ball, and whose own daughter was bullied, obese and died by suicide. Asked about this, she shrugged. (She also told the filmmaker that no one would want to see his film. Because “it could be possibly very tedious…to watch.”) And then the documentarian alleges that maybe “Dick” doesn’t remember the incident?! What a world.