Babies, the documentary of four countries and four babies, opened in the USA
last week. The film shows the different ways various cultures coddle their
kids, from First World (San Francisco and Tokyo) to Third World (Mongolia
and Namibia).

Its maker Thomas Balmes is a French documentary director who has made a
few little-seen works of cultural anthropology – the conversion of Papua New Guinea natives to Christianity, Finns
seeing how their outsourced cellphones are manufactured in China.

Then, five years ago, a friend hit him with a big idea. “He said,
“Why not do a wildlife documentary on babies?” ” Balmes recalls. “No
narration, just observing, being with babies on their level. I realized we
could shift the perspective from us looking at the world from our point of
view, to seeing it from the babies” point of view – how they see their
world.”

His answers to a few questions follow.

How did
you pick your countries and the babies you show in the film?

I”ve shot in a lot of these places. Mongolia
is so cinematic, Namibia
so basic. There is something universal in the American way of raising children.
What you do here today, we”ll be doing in the rest of the world tomorrow. Japan
is also to me a prediction of how we”ll be living and raising children in 50
years, all over the world,  where
everything is so crowded, noisy, not a minute”s peace.

I wanted to go from people who have zero relationship to technology, Namibia, to Mongolia, where nomadic people have
some involvement with technology. The baby steps out the door of the tent, and
he is in the wild. And from there to San Francisco
and onward to Japan.

Were
there times you had to come out from behind the camera to save a baby from
danger?

You mean like when the Mongolian baby wanders into the herd of cows? Oh,
you didn”t see everything. Not the worst things we saw.  When you”re observing, you”re not
interfering. The parents never considered me a nanny with a camera.

So the
Mongolian baby is crawling in the middle of a herd of cows! He was safe,
though, and it was cool. Is it cruel to let the child in Japan cry and
cry? That is what babies do.

The rule is, let it go, unless something really dangerous was about to
happen. I”m a father. I will stop the camera.

What
were the universal truths of child-rearing that came to you as you edited all
this footage about these babies together?

In the modern parts of the world, we have tools – books and technology –
to help raise kids. But as the film shows, a child in Mongolia can
spend hours just watching the sky or a fly or the cat. He”s the happiest child
I have ever seen. … These babies were all loved by their families, loved in
different ways. A loved baby has all the advantages, no matter where it grows
up.