Cut the crap
The Krokus holiday is typically stuffed with things to do with the kids who are out of school for a week (didn’t they just have Christmas vacation?), but you’ll hardly do better than either the Krokusfestival (above) or the Youth Film Festival. It’s the 25th anniversary of this fest that brings the best of European cinema for the under-20s to both Bruges and Antwerp.
The Youth Film Festival celebrates 25 years of bringing better family films to Flanders
For its jubilee, the festival will reach into its archives and show some of its highlights from the last 25 years, in addition to the regular programme of films in competition, films for the very little (if it’s their first time in a cinema, they will receive a “cinema diploma”) and the beautifully titled Cut the Crap section, films for teenagers.
The festival began in 1989 as a way to get quality film for all ages into Belgium, a sort of antidote to Disney and other simplistic kids’ movies. So films from across Europe are brought in and dubbing is discouraged. Instead, live voiceovers are done (in Dutch) during screenings of films for the littler kids.
In that category, I recommended the Verloren schat (Lost Treasure) double feature, which includes the stop-motion films The Secret of the Ice Flower (Denmark) and L’Histoire du chapeau à plume de geai (The History of Geai’s Feather Hat). In the former, all hell breaks loose when an old circus owner shares a very special secret with his grandkids, and in the latter, a king sends his three sons on a mission to find his beloved lost hat.
Films for older kids, meanwhile, are subtitled in Dutch. Those in competition run the gamut from social drama to sugary war-time patriotism to the saving of cuddly animals. One of the best is German director Evgeny Ruman’s Igor and the Cranes’ Journey, in which a pre-adolescent boy must leave his ornithologist father and home in Eastern Europe to live in Israel with his mother. Another good bet is Tony 10 by Dutch director Mischa Kamp, in which a boy devises several means of bringing his loving parents back on speaking terms after his father gets an unexpected job in politics.
Cut the Crap, meanwhile, has plenty to appeal to the over-12s, and you won’t go wrong with Jitters, an Icelandic film that made it out of Iceland, which is rare enough. It’s all about teenage social ills, as sensitive Gabriel grapples with his feelings for another boy, while his friends spend a summer of average teenage hedonism.
The Youth Film Festival also offers workshops, screenings inside tents in squares across both cities and streamed movies for kids who have limited mobility so they can enjoy movies in their own homes.
About the author
Lisa Bradshaw is the editor-in-chief of Flanders Today. She worked as an editor and journalist in her homeland, the United States, before moving to the awesome city of Ghent in 2004. If she’s not in the office, she’s probably at a film festival.
