Gene Boy Came Home
2007 film by Alanis Obomsawin
Gene Boy Came Home is a 2007 documentary film by First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
The film tells the story of Eugene "Gene Boy" Benedict, who is a First Nations person raised on the Odanak Indian Reserve, approximately an hour and a half east of Montreal. He left home at age 15 to work in construction in New York City. At 17, adrift and beginning to lose his way, he accepted a dare and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. A few months later, he was on his way to the frontlines of the Vietnam War.
The film recounts Benedict's childhood, when he was taken from his family sent to school in Ontario. In his teens, he left his reserve to in then high steel construction in the United States. On a dare from his step-father, he enlisted in the U.S. military and went through boot camp at Parris Island. The film combines his recollections of experiences there with scenes of a contemporary boot camp, to show how little has changed in the way young men are broken down and remade as soldiers.
Benedict was assigned as a sniper and scout at Da Nang.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5531095. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gene Boy Came Home” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.