Children’s Film Festivals as Potential Spaces for Radical Content/Consumption

Brown, Noel and Kyas, Barbora (2025) Children’s Film Festivals as Potential Spaces for Radical Content/Consumption. In: Radical Children's Film and Television. Children's Film and Television . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 299-314. ISBN 9781399536059

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The children’s film festival is the most important vehicle for the distribution of non-mainstream productions for children and youth, but it has been almost entirely overlooked as an object of study.1 This chapter aims to redress the balance, exploring its potential as a space
for the exhibition and consumption of radical content. The film festival for children, we argue, is the only platform where radical topics can be presented live and direct to the target audience. This radical potential is inherent in its structure, immediacy and privileged position both as intrinsic to the children’s film industry and as partially
external to it, existing outside the systems of mainstream production, distribution and exhibition that dominate the multimedia terrain for children and young people. As well as theorising the position of the children’s film festival within the larger institutional framework of international children’s cinema, this chapter explores how such festivals are shaped by local, regional and national attitudes towards
children and media, as well as broader constructions of childhood and adulthood. It also explores the relationship between children’s film festivals and the local community, particularly schools. Drawing on interviews with several international children’s film festival programmers, we weigh the potentiality of the children’s film festival as a promoter of radical content against the cultural and institutional constraints that place limits on its subversive challenge to norms of production and consumption.

Item Type: Book Section
Faculty / Department: Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Creative and Performing Arts
SWORD Depositor: eprints api
Depositing User: eprints api
Date Deposited: 07 Jul 2025 11:35
Last Modified: 07 Jul 2025 11:35
URI: https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4699

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item