With excellent performances from Ryan Jones and Nathan Varnson, "Hide Your Smiling Faces" is another of the remarkable and recently seen films about children and adolescents, adding it to a list that includes "These Birds Walk", a documentary about street kids in Pakistan, who find refuge in a home created by an old humanist; and a science- fiction motion picture dealing with education, and sold as a horror movie, called "The Tall Man", which is in reality a terrifying parable of the destiny of children these days, that made me think of the education methods in totalitarian societies and reminded me of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". "Hide Your Smiling Faces" is the gentle one, although it does not lack elements of tension in environment, family and relations among the young persons. It belongs to the category of observational motion pictures, in which you deduce and obtain information (and, from an aesthetic angle, pleasure from the viewing experience) in a very quiet way. Even its dramatic peaks are handled in a wise tone, with a quiet touch, when danger is present: I refer to the final scenes involving Jones and Varnson, with elders and the force of nature (I can't be more specific, for I would spoil your viewing experience). In a jaded world where violent images are what bring "artistic fulfillment" to most persons, motion pictures like this one, although rarely done, are the kind of productions that are needed every now and then, to remind us all what we are, where we belong and what in the end is the purpose of existence.
