Not Just for Kids: The Columbus International Children's Film Festival

Posted by Peter Smith

This weekend brings this year's incarnation of the Columbus International Children's Film Festival, being held from Thursday, November 29 through Sunday, December 2, at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Currently in its fourth year, the Children's Fest is co-organized by Wex assistant film/video curator Chris Stults and youth program educator Kendra Meyer, as a collaboration between the Center's Film/Video and Education departments. Similar festivals geared to children are held in Toronto, New York, and Chicago, and they're extremely popular in Europe.

The Children's Fest seeks to spotlight a diverse lineup of international family-friendly fare, and this year is no exception. The films include Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo's Opal Dream, Michel Ocelot's African animated film Kirikou and the Wild Beasts, the classic educational film The Way Things Go, documentaries Third Monday in October and Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life, and a program of cartoons. "One constant," Stults says, "is that we always show a classic silent film — with live music when possible — and it's a delight to see how well those films still play for young audiences." This year's silent selection is one of the greats: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

This year, two titles are of particular interest. After the rousing success of this spring's Jim Henson retrospective, the fest will be screening the original TV version of Henson's 1977 holiday special Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, introduced by Muppet performer Dave Goelz, best known as the voice of Gonzo.

In addition, the Festival will present the Columbus premiere of Jafar Panahi's Offside, a film geared to a somewhat older crowd than the Festival's usual audience. In Stults' words, "not only is it a great film, but it's a wonderful view into one aspect of life in Iran, a country that children and teenagers might hear a lot about these days but which they probably have few opportunities to see — especially in ways that they would understand or relate to."

Childhood is a time of almost boundless creativity, but too many films for children are lacking in that department. As Stults says, "Once children start accepting films like Cheaper By the Dozen as the norm, then they're that much likelier to have lowered expectations about the possibilies of art and film for the rest of their lives." This is why the Columbus Children's Fest and others like it are invaluable not only for children but for their families as well.

In just four years, the Children's Fest has quickly become a highlight of the Wexner Center's film schedule, bringing in new audiences every year. As Stults tells me, "the most satisfying reactions often come. . . when someone (usually a parent) writes to say how a film they saw gave their family something to talk about for days afterwards, or how a screening made a child look at the world or their life in a different way." Isn't that what great cinema — both for children and for adults — is all about?

— Paul Clark

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Posted Nov 28 2007, 01:00 PM

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