Word: nyicff
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...organizers of the New York International Children's Film Festival (NYICFF), which runs through March 21, understand that their target is not really children. This year's special attraction, for example, is a retrospective of 50 years of French animation. For those who find that too trifling a diversion, there's In the Attic, touted as a "Soviet-era allegory" by "legendary Czech stop-motion animation master Jiri Barta." No? How about the U.S. premiere of the German Expressionist film Little White Lies, which foreshadows the arrival of fascism through the microcosm of one school...
Heavy subject matter isn't the only thing that sets children's-film-festival offerings apart from their commercial cousins at the multiplex. NYICFF is also showing Fantastic Planet, which comes with a classic caveat for parents about "non-explicit alien nuptials." Mai Mai Miracle depicts third-graders and a toddler getting wasted on liqueur-filled chocolates. In The Old Lady and the Pigeons, there's an attempt at cannibalism. These are films for parents who prefer to expose their children to dystopia, dysfunction and dissolution rather than to Disney. (See pictures of animated movies...
Amuse-Bouche, the risibly titled animated French short-films program at the NYICFF, ran the gamut from an ingenious retelling of the fable of the lion and the mouse to Masques, a confrontation between two masks floating over a desert landscape. And if it's hard to imagine any children enjoying Black Tea, about a man's complicated feelings for a hot beverage, expressed in such terms as "microbes in the dental pulp," it's equally hard to imagine them not loving Oktapodi, a romantic comedy about octopuses. Mostly, however, the kids in the audience seemed nonplussed...
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