Petter Lennstrand: “Puppets in itself are dead material”
This year’s ECFA Award winner addresses the very youngest audience with a feature in which live actors and puppets playing alongside each other. In this wonderfully absurd adventure everything is possible, thanks to a brave girl with a boundless imagination. Director Petter Lennstrand came toBerlin to collect his prize: “I’m really happy about this award. In Sweden the expectations for UP IN THE SKY were limited, but the film will still be around for a while in the festivals.”
Why Europe needs attention to children’s film
The May edition of the ECFA Journal is out now. 
I AM WILLIAM is the winner of the ECFA Award 2018 at the BUFF Festival in Malmö. In this Danish film by Jonas Elmer, William moves in with his uncle, a small-time crook. Whenever he ends up in a scrape William is the one who has to help him out. And if that isn’t enough some bullies are trying to extort money from him using threats of violence. Luckily his new friend Viola comes to the rescue. 
Created in 1988 by 40 directors, actors and producers, the European Film Academy (EFA) now unites more than 3,400 filmmakers across Europe with the common aims of celebrating the excellence and diversity of European cinema, attracting new audiences to European film and drawing attention to new European talent. Throughout the year, the EFA initiates and participates in a series of activities dealing with film politics as well as economic, artistic, and training aspects, culminating in the annual presentation of the European Film Awards. 
Thanks to the cooperation with the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam, ECFA will continue its tradition of quality seminars for the industry. Cinekid director Floor van Spaendonck confirmed that forces will be bundled with ECFA and EYE Filmmuseum to welcome ECFA members and industry people on October 23rd 2018 in Amsterdam for a Film Education Seminar, under the working title ‘A Network of Networks (and How Film and Media are Related)’, in the run-up to the yearly Cinekid for Professionals conference. 
To hold a children’s film festival on the first sunny weekend of the year would seem a disaster, especially in the sun-starved Nordics. However, in May 2017 as the sun burst through the trees, the audience flocked to Film in the Forest – a new film and culture festival for children aged 3-10 in Aarhus, Denmark. 
The Abloom Filmfestival was founded in 2002 by Faridah S. Nabaggala, a filmmaker and film enthusiast, born in Uganda, now living in Norway. She cherished a dream of dedicating a film festival to children and young people with a disability, in the conviction that every child has the right to be heard and seen and the right to blossom. It’s no coincidence that Abloom has a flower bud as a mascot. In 2015, this fast-growing event was granted the Oslo City Culture Award.