“Are you a human or a mouse?” asks the coach of the children’s team. Viggo answers doubtfully, but the whole team yells “Man”! After training, Viggo goes to his friend Noel’s house, which has a sauna. The boys start a competition in who is more courageous. There’s also a kiss on the lips somewhere in there. We are talking about the scenario description of the film “Boys in the Soul” by the Swede Christian Zetterberg, which the Greek theater critic showed to a ten-year-old class in the 4th grade. Boys at Heart tells the story of male friendship and how two boys are forced to follow the norms of masculinity. Since 2021, the film has been seen by thousands of children, and in 2022 it was voted the best European short film for children. It has a pedagogical purpose of thinking about children, and its address age range was 11-18 years old, and was chosen as a teacher because it is on the Greek Film Center’s CINEDU digital film platform.

The day after the screening, the issue made headlines in Greek media and went viral on the Internet because two parents demanded disciplinary control of a teacher because they said their 10-year-old son was in shock after discovering homosexuality. messages in the movie. To refute the argument of the parents is slippery. The legal framework of our country allows them to use any legal remedies.

The issue, of course, with the screening of a short film that is not allowed for that age, as parents claim, was butter for bread for TV and online media. For information that focuses on a superficial presentation of issues and uses as an alibi parallel monologues that the opposing sides do in the windows. The media—television, print, electronics—that use telecafe logic do a disservice to public information and industry credibility. The question, of course, is whether citizens understand the extremes of the media when it comes to easily capturing readers, listeners, and TV viewers. I doubt. Moreover, the way the media and institutional bodies reacted to the protest of the parents of a 10-year-old child against the film demonstrates a profound distortion of how school autonomy is viewed in Greece.

The opportunistic perspective of the media in evaluating “sensitive” news rests on the conservatism of society and parents, who, with automatic features, contribute to the “protection” of their children from what they can see and experience at school, and do not “button” their own agendas. For example, they are annoyed by teachers who act outside the box, they judge teachers harshly (how can they all be excellent students?), they have a say in what is taught in school, they deprive children of the freedom to practice art. experiences they don’t understand.

A (large) part of society is asking the school to teach its children its own ideas, belly-butting that only it knows the right way. He can only see the world through social media filters, but he dares not open up to it.