European Children's
Film Association
Association Européenne du Cinéma
pour l'Enfance et la Jeunesse
Few festivals hand out as many awards as the Olympia Festival in Pyrgos, Greece. Not only by combining the festival awards with the Camera Zizanio Awards for young filmmakers, but also when it comes to ECFA Awards! There were three of them, with the remarkable I, JULIA winning as the Best Short.
As festival director Julia Fleißig said in her recent ECFA Journal interview: “We want our programme to stand out. We don’t have a hundred titles in our catalogue; our catalogue is small and considerately compiled and stimulates thinking out-of-the-box.” From these titles, MICA (Ismaël Ferroukhi, France) was picked by the ECFA Jury.
The Greek organisation Fest of Fests organised a series of webinars about Generation Z (Gen-Z, born between 1997-2012), the first generation of “digital natives”. In November & December, they collected the input from media educators on different continents in three online meetings.
At the Riga Int’l Film Festival, children’s films sail under their own flag, named Kid’s Reel, catching up again with their ECFA Awards tradition, for features (MY BROTHER CHASES DINOSAURS) and for shorts (MUM IS POURING RAIN).
In their closing statement, the Filem’on festival in Brussels described the feeling of welcoming the audience in the cinemas as “Ecstatic. We enjoyed every minute of it!” Among the three ECFA Awards handed out, the most striking one was the ECFA Doc Award for RAISE THE BAR.
The 4th Cinemira Int’l Children’s & Youth Film Festival in Budapest spanned two weekends in October, one dedicated to Cinemira TEEN and one to Cinemira KIDS. In pitch forums for the first time not only professional filmmakers but also teenagers presented their film ideas. Meanwhile, 10 European festival representatives attended the Partner up! Conference to discuss potential future collaborations.
While in the second Oulu Children’s Film Forum, the challenges of international production and financing of children’s films were discussed, the ECFA Jury awarded two titles from Oulu Festival competition: THE APE STAR and 90%.
How to create a full cinema experience in pandemic times? Like Schlingel did, with even more efforts from the team, even more venues, even more films, and ultimately… even more audience: 17,000 visitors in total.