At the Children's Film Festival, Unstoppable Heroines

New York Times

26-02-2025

A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again.
These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children's Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year's festival, which begins a three-weekend run in Manhattan on Friday, includes 13 features and 79 short films, many of them proudly celebrating girls and women.
Although the slate doesn't neglect films about boys, among them tales of time-traveling brothers and a boatbuilding father-son team, the choices exalt girl power more than any of the festival's selections in recent memory.
'A lot of these stories of strong girls and women are true-to-life stories,' Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival's programming director, said in an interview. She referred to two films that have their initial festival showings this weekend (every feature has two screening dates): Erica Tanamachi's live-action documentary 'Home Court' follows the Cambodian American basketball player Ashley Chea from her California preparatory school to her freshman year at Princeton, while the animated 'Hola, Frida,' by André Kadi and Karine Vézina, draws on the early years of the artist Frida Kahlo.
'Obviously, the story of Frida Kahlo is a story that a lot of people feel like they're familiar with, but telling it from the perspective of her child self is really interesting,' Villaseñor said.
Delivering unusual fare that young viewers might otherwise miss — short films, offbeat independent cinema, subtitled foreign movies — is a hallmark of the festival, now in its 29th year and one of the largest and broadest of its kind. (It also operates classroom programs and a national touring film slate.) And unlike many film fairs for children, the New York festival, which offers program tickets starting at $17 (a full-festival pass is $135), includes multiple screenings for teenagers and even college students, who can see some of their peers' work in a showcase on March 15.
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