While we were busy reliving our Spielberg-tinted childhood through the adventures of precocious American kids in Stranger Things, a quiet rebellion has been underway right under our noses. The protagonists of this rebellion are: curated children’s segments at popular film festivals, a new series of books introducing kids to film classics, a TV network dedicating a channel to children’s films and India’s first online children’s film festival. Sounds straight out of some movie? Well, it’s not. Tired of waiting for children’s content to get a mainstream push in India, a few good adults are taking matters in their own hands and trying to bridge the gap between great cinema and children.
In Stranger Things , the narrative centres around the theme of friendship. It’s the cornerstone of all our childhood experiences and that is why we relate to this content so much. Samina Mishra, a filmmaker, writer and teacher, chose to focus on the theme of friendship while curating this year’s Half Ticket (children’s segment) at the recently concluded 19th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
Catching them young
Under the theme “the hand of friendship”, Mishra included classics like TheRed Balloon (1956) and Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), and even an older Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI) film called Mujhse Dosti Karoge (1992). “Although some of these films have been around for more than 50 years and are available online as well, not many people know about it,” says Mishra.
Monica Wahi, also a children’s film curator, has selected children’s films for the recently concluded Dharamshala International Film Festivals (DIFF), and a set of films for the channel ‘Tata Sky Kids Cinema’, dedicated to showcasing children’s films from India and around the world. This includes award-winning Indian live-action films like Halo (1996), Chutkan ki Mahabharat (2004) or I Am Kalam (2011) as well as animated films from around the world like the Japanese My Neighbour Tortoro (1998) and French film A Cat in Paris (2010) .
But why do we need to introduce children to cinema? Wahi is of the opinion that films become a means to opening up their worldview. “The kind of environment that kids are living in today is a boxed-up one,” she says. “So how do you expose children to a wider experience?”
Not only does exposure to cinema increase our knowledge of the world, it also helps alter our understanding of it. “Cinema is a very powerful medium to reconsider our opinion of the world,” Wahi affirms. “We need to open the world of the child, give them the opportunity to look at the world in a new way or discover things they haven’t seen before or feel empathetic.” Both Mishra and Wahi believe that unlike the assumptions adults make about children’s acceptance of serious content, they are actually quite open to complex issues like death, immigration or inequality.
Forming world views
In an example of a film that helped children express their deepest thoughts or question their own prejudices, Wahi recalls being pleasantly surprised at the response to a 2016 film called Window Horses . The film was about a Canadian girl who goes to Iran to perform at a poetry festival. After watching the film, a young audience member said, “I thought Iran was a land of terrorists and now I realise that Iran is a land of poetry, humour and much more.” Another film, on disability, brought out responses on caste discrimination faced at school.
Mishra narrates a similar experience at MAMI, when the children’s jury awarded the animated short film called Half A Life – which was about being a young gay activist man in Egypt. “They not only felt it was something that they should know and think about, but also enjoyed the documentary form of the film,” recalls Mishra.
What fascinates both the curators is how within the space of a few hours one can absolutely change the way kids look at the world. And it not only leads to challenging them but also questions the opinions of grown-ups within the family or within school.
Cinema in a book
Asking the right questions is what film critic and author Raja Sen wants children to do once they read or hear his poetic retelling of the film classic The Godfather . Sen’s new book, The Best Baker in the World is part of a series by Penguin’s Puffin imprint, titled ‘My First Matinee’. Sen chose the limerick form to introduce the film to children because he wanted them to have fun reading it, so that the stories would roll off the tongue easily. It also comes with a set of quirky illustrations; with each character represented as the animal they embody the best.
Having grown up in a typically artistic Bengali family, Sen was exposed to good cinema early. But also felt that he didn’t always understand it when he watched it as a child. The book then becomes a way to introduce such films to kids and some day when they do watch the film, they can get a better understanding of it. But one can also ask whether this is the “right” film to introduce to children. When it comes to kids’ content, isn’t there always an assumption about what is and what is not a children’s film?
“You create this world for a kid where you’re replacing what was much more dark and sinister with something else – because the kids understand drama and storytelling,” says Sen. “So what would be an assassination in one world, could be the popping of a particular favourite balloon in the child’s life – it could have the same emotional heft.”
New forums
With the proliferation of the online space, it’s easy to find films, but what is difficult, is curating the right kind of content for a child. School Cinema, the film arm of LXL Ideas, makes short films on life skills and these are accompanied by workbooks, which go directly to school children. As a part of their efforts to introduce good cinema to kids, they are organising a week-long online children’s film festival called the International Kids Film Festival of India.
The festival will run this week (Nov 14-19), with films curated from India and around the world. “We felt that an online film would be more accessible than having it in just one theatre,” said Neha Jain, head - films, LXL Ideas. “Often parents are unable to take children to film festivals for practical reasons. We wanted the schools to take the onus and host the festival.”
But how did they choose the films? The aesthetics of cinema is something that Jain feels is important to introduce children to. “We’re looking at several things - the cinematic appeal, aesthetics of the film as a work of art, the relevance for Indian children – themes and stories,” she says. Among the films to be screened is this film called Lila, a non-verbal short film about a girl who uses imagination and creativity to complete stories she sees around her. This is not about a message, but is about imagination. There is also a documentary film called Confessions of a Social Bully , which talks about the relevant issue of bullying, but in a format that is arresting and engaging to watch.
Baby steps
This quiet rebellion by a handful of adults gives one the feeling that things might be shifting ever so slightly in the domain of children’s cinema in India. But one realises that both the state and the film industry need to shift their focus towards making this happen on a larger scale. Meanwhile, Mishra is hopeful about the individuals and organisations making such an effort. “There is no point in dismissing everything,” she says. “There is so much material available to engage children with the arts, we have to just think of interesting ways of how to do it.”
For more details on the International Kids Film Festival of India, see: http://ikffi.lxl.in/
