The Children's Filmfest at the Mill Valley Film Festival is 20 years-old this year.
With ground work done in 1993 with my first program, Films for People 4 and UP, the festival allowed me to return from my year at the Chicago Children's International Film Festival to establish the Children's Filmfest in 1995.
I wrote the following in an application for a role as a Learning Designer with a firm I've admired since learning so much about it in graduate school. This paragraph is a "Little darling" that I had to do away with from that text, but couldn't part with it because its history is so dear to me and my development as researcher, filmmaker, designer - contributor.
The Academy Award Winning film, “The
Fantastic Voyage” (US1966) curated for the newly established Children’s
Filmfest at the Mill Valley Filmfest did as I had designed it to do: it
generated wonder about the human body. This was evident in vibrant conversation between the young audience, the
director, Richard Fleischer, and his medical consultant. “Is it really that loud
in the heart?” a seven year-old boy asked. Fleischer responded that he had used actual recordings of
the heartbeat and put himself inside the sound in a sound booth so he could
understand what it would be like inside a heart. He imparted his creative
combination of Science and Art. I didn’t follow up on this boy -I wouldn't doubt it if he went into Medicine-but I did keep
contact with one very impressive child who I met while serving on an award jury in
2001. Felix had spent his childhood seeing films and participating in conversations with directors at the Berlin Film Festival’s
children and youth section, more than ten years later I sought evidence of its impact. That
story is here, "Finding Felix."
No comments:
Post a Comment