Translated material
Reservation for children
The international festival of the Rolan Bykov Foundation is being held in Moscow for the 25th time
Until January 7, at the Roland cinema and the Five Stars multiplex, you can see films participating in the XXV International Film Festival for Children and Youth. The competition program (11 films) is dominated by fairy tales, mostly Christmas ones. The Finnish “A Christmas Story” tells about the childhood of Santa Claus, the Icelandic action-packed film “No Access” offers a story about Christmas in the far North (there, for example, a polar bear effectively steps on a ringing cell phone). And in the cartoon “Niko: Path to the Stars,” a little deer is looking for his father, who serves in Santa Claus’s team. By the way, in the feature film “Where is Santa Claus’ Horse?”, as the title implies, Santa rides a horse, and the heroine of the film, a girl from a small Dutch village, looks after her. The Polish-Finnish puppet cartoon is based on Tove Janson’s story “The Moomins and the Summer Madness,” beloved by all children and adults. There are stories about the magical properties of Beethoven’s score (“The Secret of Morpheus” by K. Huttop), saving a shadow theater with the help of Mozart and a fairy princess (“Mozart in China”) and meeting an alien (“Summer of the Flying Saucer”).Against this background, the plots of the two Russian films presented in the competition seem harshly realistic. In “On the Bridge” by father and son Razumovsky, a provincial orphanage finds happiness in a Moscow center for troubled teenagers. “The Twelfth Summer” by Pavel Fattakhutdinov tells about the arrival of a city girl in the village.
The only title familiar to the general public in the competition is “The Adventures of Despereaux,” a joint American-British cartoon about the adventures of a brave big-eared mouse based on a fairy tale by writer Kate Dicamillo, which is already in wide release. The rest of the films are the result of co-production by mainly European film companies, the authors of which are unfamiliar to the Russian audience. It seems that this is due not only to monetary reasons (as the organizers put it, “not all countries can reach a financial consensus”), but also to ideological ones. Fewer and fewer special films for children are being made around the world, and the division of cinema into adult and children’s films, which was familiar to the Soviet consciousness, has actually lost its meaning. The very name of the festival sounds like an anachronism. The concept of “youth” has almost disappeared from modern language; The first rows at the premiere of full-length cartoons are occupied by bearded cinephiles.
A year before the opening of the first festival (which at that time was held as part of the summer MIFF), Steven Spielberg's film E.T., one of the first examples of family cinema, received four Oscar awards; a film for which not only the child, but also his parents, who have not yet put the game console away on the mezzanine, are happy to buy a ticket. And one of the most successful films of the past year was the Pixar studio’s animated fairy tale about the robot scavenger “Wally.”
Film adaptations of comic books, fairy tales and novels are among the most expensive but profitable Hollywood projects. Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter epic, Hellboy by Guillermo del Torro, Spider-Man. At the same time, film adaptations of children's works are not always designed for young audiences. There are children's films that have age restrictions. For the same “Alien”, persons under 12 years of age were allowed only when accompanied by adults.
Family cinema visits multiply the number of tickets sold; The most unexpected examples are included in children's films. In its second part, the project called “Carrot Love” turned from an eccentric comedy about gender relations into a film about family values and for family viewing - with the exception of some slippery moments. “The Tale of Fedot the Archer,” which opened the festival, is based on a satire by Leonid Filatov with jokes on the topic of drunkenness and international politics, made in bright and complex technique, and although it is positioned as a spectacle for the holidays, a child under 14 will undoubtedly be rocked by the monotonous poetic rhythm and a parody of the TV series “Plot” will not amuse you.
In a situation where, in relation to cinema, “mass” and “children’s” are becoming synonymous, a specialized children’s film festival looks like a reservation, a nature reserve, entry to the territory of which is still limited by age. It is no wonder that a program of retrospectives occupies a large place in his 17-day schedule. The films “A Dog Walked Along the Piano,” “Yaroslavna, the Queen of France,” and “Scarecrow,” which celebrated its 25th anniversary, a special screening of which took place at the Rolan Bykov school, are memories of a time when cinema audiences were truly massive and could be was divided according to age.
By the way, in connection with the anniversary of “Scarecrow,” one can only regret that Valeria Gai-Germanika with a modern version of a film about school cruelty did not pass the strict selection for the “Panorama” program, which presents the most notable films from 2007-2008. An example of the language the former “youth” speaks about themselves. In Bykov’s film, the team bullied a girl who was different from the others. There is less sympathy in the director's feature debut about the lives of ninth-graders. The heroines of “Everyone will die, but I will remain” demonstrate inexhaustible resources of self-destruction.