Often overlooked at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival are the spirited movies for kids that appear under the rubric "Childish Films."
Unlike adults, kids don't have a Landmark Theater chain to provide a taste of foreign or independent pictures, having to rely instead on Disney or yet another horrible Dr. Seuss adaptation for their diversions.
Curators Deb Girdwood and Isabelle Harder literally travel the globe to hunt down animated and live-action pictures that rely less on CGI and famous actors, and more on strong story lines, complex characters and a child's imagination.
Last season, for example, Harder found herself in Amsterdam searching for intriguing pictures while Girdwood made for Seattle to do the same. Prize winners at festivals in Canada, Finland, India and around the country also help in the process.
At the festival's St. Anthony Main home, there will be a number of movies for teenagers for the first time. "That is a demographic that doesn't get to see foreign films very often," Girdwood says.
Young adults may find themselves relating to "Bitter Sweetheart," a Swedish import about 15-year-old Lina, who is determined that this will be the semester when she has the same sexual encounters that her friends enjoy (8 p.m. April 26 and 7:05 p.m. April 28).
"Max Minsky & Me" is a sweet German film about a high school girl who yearns to make the basketball team so she can go play in Luxembourg, where a handsome prince lives. In the meantime, she has to contend with a bat mitzvah, her parents' divorce and accidentally falling in love with someone other than the prince (1:15 p.m. next Sun. and 3:20 p.m. April 26).
As usual, Childish Films will feature a great variety of strange and fascinating shorts from around the globe that will not only rouse your charges from their spot in front of the TV set, but just might induce them to make movies themselves -- or convince the man in the moon to join them here on Earth, just like Lucia in the German short "Moonman" (3:20 p.m. next Sun. and noon April 26).
