Could the possibility of creating their own content be homeopathic against the massive doses of corporate culture that children consume daily?
Deep Dish TV (1986)
This session proposes a dialogue between four pieces in which children put their childish guessing power into practice, combining stories that emerge from shapes and colours. Their narrations adopt an autobiographical character and show their creative capacity when it comes to inventing possible futures or their ideas about humour, devising wild and wonderful pieces.
In Nekem az élet teccik nagyon, a group of Roma boys and girls from a rural area of Hungary write letters in the context of a workshop given at their school. The texts reflect the way they see the adult world going on around them: in them, they try to decipher what makes them happy and what causes them pain in relation to their families, their community, customs and work. With the animation techniques they learn, the pupils bring their stories to life by means of illustrations full of colour and movement, while reflecting on what the act of creating itself gives them.
Based on drawings and testimonies collected as part of a school workshop, Ünnepeink reflects on Hungarian festivities, their representation and their symbols. The participants try to explain what the holidays mean to them by mixing up the names, dates and historical data. The result is a series of misunderstandings that led to censorship of the film in 1980s Hungary.
Children Make Movies documents a workshop held at the Lillian Wald Recreation Rooms and Settlement, showing two processes carried out by a group of children accompanied by the activist Deedee Halleck: the making of a film without a camera and the filming of a sequence of a work of fiction.
In Divinations, children in Brussels, Athens and Sarajevo stick strips of clear adhesive tape on the streets of the cities where they live. When they remove them, the city has left its mark: dust, insects, glass, sweet wrappers… Viewing the remains with a magic lantern and practising the childish power of divination, they begin to narrate ultra-realistic possible stories of the future…
Nekem az élet teccik nagyon (I Like Life a Lot), Kati Macskássy, 1977, 10’ (OV with Spanish subtitles)
Ünnepeink (Our Holidays), Kati Macskássy, 1981, 9’ (OV with Spanish subtitles)
Children Make Movies, DeeDee Halleck, 1961, 8’ (OV with Catalan subtitles)
Divinations, Sarah Vanagt, 2019, 34’ (OV with Spanish subtitles)
Digital screening. Copies of Nekem az élet teccik nagyon and Ünnepeink courtesy of the National Film Institute Hungary. Copy of Children Make Movies courtesy of the author. Copy of Divinations courtesy of the Barcelona International Women’s Film Festival.
