Reeling Children In

The Children’s Film Society announces a new film festival with cleanliness as the theme for its first edition.

A still from the National Award-winning film Kaphal.

On November 14, Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), a department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that produces children’s films, will host its first edition of the National Children’s Film Festival (NCFF). To be held in Delhi at Siri Fort Auditorium, it will be a three-day festival that will showcase films, host workshops and other activities around filmmaking for children.

The CFSI already has The Golden Elephant or International Film Festival India, organised every alternate year in Hyderabad, which hosted its 18th edition in 2013. The NCFF will also be organised once in two years, that is, every year when The Golden Elephant is not held. However, the CEO of CFSI, Shravan Kumar says the new property will have a greater reach. “The Golden Elephant is held only in one city. But NCFF, after the inaugural session in Delhi, will travel to all other Indian states,” says Kumar.

Its theme, swachhata or “cleanliness”, ties it in with PM Narendra Modi’s pet project Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Consequently, some films that will be showcased will be based on the theme.

CFSI will premiere their recent project, Pappu Ki Pagdandi. For the debut edition of NCFF, CFSI hopes to utilise the vast collection of Indian and international children’s films it has acquired for The Golden Elephant and its recent National Award-winning production Kaphal. The festival will screen a score of unreleased films, which includes Shortcut Safari, The Goal and Mahek Mirza, among others. Some of these films have won awards globally.

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The festival will also host workshops on dance, music, magic, animation, as well as one on Charlie Chaplin. One of the highlights of the festival is the film workshops conducted by experts from Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) for kids between 5 to 16 years of age. The entry to the festival will be free.

The last four years have seen a resurgence of sorts for CFSI. Of the feature and animation films they have recently produced, several have done well internationally. Gattu (2012) got a special mention at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, animation film Goopi Gawaiiyya Bagha Bajaiyya premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013.

Kumar says there is also a conscious attempt to improve the quality of films produced and marketted by CFSI. “We tied up with a distributor who paid for the screenings of Gattu in Delhi theatres and used our network with schools, encouraging them to bring students for the film. We earned Rs 1.6 lakh from the exercise,” he says. CFSI is now planning to replicate the model with its upcoming releases.

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The 59-year-old institution plans to harness its earlier work. It has digitised its stock of 259 films, including the first production, Jalpari. It intends to show the 100 best titles in remote corners of India. These include KA Abbas’s Bharat Darshan (1972), Mrinal Sen’s Ichhapuran (1969) and Durga Khote’s Masterji (1964). Kumar says that the titles have for long been considered to be library films, accessed by those interested in cinema.

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