Aurelia Butler

The selections at this year’s New York International Children’s Film Festival blend fantastical elements with serious real-world themes.The characters in the offerings at the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival often resolve crises in unexpected ways: by tossing magical seeds. Or slamming enchanted doors. Or, in what may be the most startling example, following a giant porcupine as it lumbers through the streets of Rotterdam.These fantastical elements, however, appear alongside realities that more commercial movies for young people usually avoid. This year’s festival, which begins on Friday evening and continues for three weekends — two in Manhattan and Brooklyn theaters, and one at the Sag Harbor Cinema on Long Island — explores subjects like the civil war in Syria, accelerating threats of natural disaster, the plight of unauthorized immigrants and, in one short documentary, the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on a family with members in both New York and Odesa. Now in its 26th year, the festival seeks not just to entertain young audiences but also to expand their worldviews.“There’s a concerted effort to talk about human rights and focus on global citizenry,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But, she added, “I think that playfulness is really rolling out in all kinds of interesting ways throughout our slate.”That menu, comprising 16 features and nearly 60 short films, which will be offered entirely in person for the first time since 2020, begins with Friday’s world premiere of “Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia.” (This title and many others will be shown more than once.) An animated film from France and Luxembourg, it follows Ernest, a gruff but good-hearted bear, and Celestine, a vivacious mouse, as they journey to Ernest’s homeland to have his cherished violin, a “Stradibearius,” repaired. Once there, they’re shocked to learn that the country has prohibited almost all music-making.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia,” which will make its world premiere at the festival, follows a bear and a mouse on a wild journey that touches on themes of autocracy and personal autonomy.GKIDS/StudioCanalThe filmmakers, Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger (Roger will visit the festival for an opening-night Q. and A.), have filled the movie with wild chases, narrow escapes and a full-fledged musical resistance. But it also touches on autocracy and personal autonomy — relevant themes in a world where dissenters are sometimes imprisoned and certain children’s books are being banned.“Kids are able to enter these films at the level that they are comfortable or ready for,” said Nina Guralnick, the executive director of the festival, which offers titles for viewers as young as 3 and has a jury that judges a broad swath of the short films. (The prizewinners then become eligible for Academy Award consideration.) “But that’s also what makes those films last,” she said, “because they will come back and think about them as their thinking becomes more sophisticated.”The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Marya Zarif, a Syrian-born filmmaker who lives in Montreal, said in a video interview that she intended “Dounia & the Princess of Aleppo,” the Canadian and French animated feature that she directed with André Kadi, to be a festival film to which young viewers can repeatedly return for new insights.Dounia, its vibrant 6-year-old heroine, sees the war steadily encroaching on her joyful life in Syria. But she has powerful protection: nigella seeds, a Middle Eastern spice. In the movie, they have mystical properties that Dounia discovers after she and her grandparents become refugees on a dangerous and sometimes heartbreaking odyssey.“I needed a magic that was rooted in Dounia’s culture,” said Zarif, who will appear via video link for a post-screening Q. and A. on Sunday. “And I needed something very small but that had big effects, like Dounia herself.”The festival also has fare for viewers well into their teens. “Suzume,” an anime feature by Makoto Shinkai that is already a blockbuster in Japan, will receive its North American premiere at the festival on Sunday.The title character, an orphaned high school student who lives with her aunt, encounters Souta, a youth who is “a closer” — one who has the task of shutting ordinary-looking doors that, when left open, unleash terrors like earthquakes and tsunamis. When a spell transforms Souta into a walking, talking chair, Suzume shoulders his world-saving burden.Such stories of female empowerment are a favorite with the festival, which annually features the short-film program “Girls’ POV.” Its offerings this year include a story that illustrates the frustrations of obtaining menstrual products and a documentary about an American all-girl tackle football league.Girls also take charge in the Dutch live-action feature “Okthanksbye,” whose two main characters are deaf 13-year-olds. When the beloved Parisian grandmother of one of the teenagers is hospitalized, they leave their Netherlands boarding school and head to France. Portrayed by Mae van de Loo and Douae Zine El Abidine — young, deaf first-time actresses — the girls embark on an adventure that includes traveling with a female punk band.The film’s director, Nicole van Kilsdonk, who wrote the script with Lilian Sijbesma, said the movie wasn’t meant to be about disability, even though the girls’ situations — one has a cochlear implant; one doesn’t — play a role. Van Kilsdonk, who on Saturday will attend the first of two open-captioned screenings and take part in a sign-language-interpreted discussion, said this coming-of-age story held a universal message: “You can do more than you think.”Douae Zine El Abidine, left, and Mae van de Loo are first-time actresses, both deaf, who play deaf teenagers in the Dutch coming-of-age feature “Okthanksbye.”Labyrint FilmFar more perilous border crossings lie at the heart of the features about immigration. “Home Is Somewhere Else,” a Mexican documentary, chronicles, in their own words, the experiences of young people with different legal statuses. Framed by the spoken-word poetry of José Eduardo Aguilar, who was himself deported from the United States, the film eschews live action in favor of vivid, varied animation.“That also was a way to protect our protagonists’ identity,” said Jorge Villalobos, who wrote and directed the film with Carlos Hagerman. (Hagerman will participate in a Q. and A. after the film’s screening on March 11.) But the men, who dealt with families on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, also found that animation gave them freedom to employ visual metaphors and depict the world through their subjects’ eyes.“Usually, documentaries are kind of talking about how the system doesn’t work,” Hagerman said. “And we are more into experiencing how does it feel to live in these situations.”Similar struggles infuse “Totem,” Sander Burger’s fictional live-action feature from Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which focuses on Ama (Amani-Jean Philippe), an 11-year-old whose Senegalese family lives in Rotterdam without documentation. Regarding herself as thoroughly Dutch, Ama ends up on the run and searching for her father after the authorities detain her other relatives. This high-spirited heroine gets aid from her spirit animal, a massive porcupine.The strong language in both immigration-related features hasn’t deterred the festival’s organizers, who provide parental advisories online. And families who may be reluctant to take children into theaters during a virus-filled winter can look forward to the festival’s Kid Flicks National Touring Program, which, in the summer, will begin sharing selections from some of its short-film packages — including Celebrating Black Stories and the Latin-themed ¡Hola Cine! — with museums, libraries and cinemas. (The festival also offers film-based curriculums for schools.)“We think we’ve doubled the number of programs that we send out,” Guralnick said. “And I feel like we just keep adding partners.” All share a goal, she added: “growing that next generation of filmgoers.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 3-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

Lily McInerny stars as a 17-year-old girl who is groomed by a predator in Jamie Dack’s feature debut.It starts with a wink at a diner. When the 17-year-old, Lea (Lily McInerny), the heroine of “Palm Trees and Power Lines” sees it — or maybe just the man delivering it — her world falls off its axis. The wink flusters Lea; it also apparently primes her. So when the guy later rolls up next to her while she’s walking home, his mouth and engine both running, she responds to his attention, somehow oblivious to the Klaxon horns of warning shrieking in the viewer’s head.Directed by Jamie Dack, who shares screenplay credit with Audrey Findlay, “Palm Trees” tracks the bleak, depressing story of Lea, who falls for the wrong guy only to tumble headlong into the abyss. Set in an especially cheerless pocket of Southern California, where high-voltage lines loom over the sparsely treed landscape, it opens in the summer. Lea is on a break and conspicuously bored. Under the inattentive watch of her single mom (Gretchen Mol, doing what she can), Lea drifts through the days and nights, sunbathing in her yard and hanging out with friends. She gets high, hooks up and so it sluggishly goes.Everything shifts when the diner guy rolls into her life. He calls himself Tom (Jonathan Tucker), although once he gets talking it’s hard to believe anything that he says. Lea, though, is nothing if not credulous, and after jokingly ordering him not to murder her, she climbs in his truck next to him. She awkwardly lights a cigarette, he asks for a drag, the camera framing their hands hovering near each other. Lea and Tom chat, and her wariness soon eases, his flirting and her interest warming the cab. They keep chatting, she asks his age — he’s 34 — and by the time that he drops her off, Lea is a goner and the story is on its way.Ambitious, torpid, wildly overlong and frustratingly underdeveloped, “Palm Trees” follows Lea as she falls for Tom, who turns out to be as awful — and as much a near-parody of villainy — as his clichéd smooth talk. He’s less overtly sleazy and certainly less well-written than the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” but Tom’s moves and words come right from the same predator playbook. Unfortunately, and curiously for a 21st-century sentient teenager with a phone in her back pocket, Lea seems not to have watched a single movie, television show, newscast, Instagram story or viral TikTok about human trafficking.It would be easier to believe Lea’s sorry tale, her naïveté and spiraling trajectory, if she had more of a discernible personality. McInerny gives the character a convincing physical diffidence, a droopy reserve that, by turns, registers as shyness, apathy and self-protectiveness, and which can make this slight, already young-looking performer look even younger than her character’s age. But Lea’s personality is as lacking in expressive detail as her bland house and cramped world, and she rarely comes persuasively alive and then not for long, which might be interesting if it seemed intentional. Instead, too often, she is a narratively convenient blank.That’s a problem for a movie about sexual agency and sexual exploitation. Dack rightly doesn’t pass judgment on Lea, and she remains on the character’s side throughout. But because she never gets in the teen’s head and even seems oddly incurious about the girl’s inner life, she fails to adequately engage with questions of sexual consent, free will and whether Lea’s choices (or those of any underage child) are truly her own. Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.Palm Trees and Power LinesRated R. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

In this three-person chamber drama, an ex-convict, a politician and a white-collar defense engage in tense conversations while pursuing their individual goals.“What We Do Next” is a three-person chamber drama that takes the scheming and blackmailing of political thrillers like “House of Cards” and shapes them into something like a morality play.In seven acts, the film tracks the relationship between Elsa (Michelle Veintimilla), an ex-convict; Sandy (Karen Pittman), a New York City politician; and Paul (Corey Stoll), a white-collar defense attorney. Years ago, when Sandy was running for office, she gave Elsa some cash to presumably flee her family home, where her father was sexually abusing her. Instead, Elsa bought a gun and shot him dead.Her lengthy prison sentence is an injustice in and of itself, the film makes clear. Like many women, Elsa is the victim of a criminal justice system that too often fails to take into account the context of abuse and survival in which such crimes take root. After being released, Elsa is left with a criminal record that has largely condemned her to low-paying work.Elsa refuses to settle for this, challenging the authenticity of Sandy’s progressive platform in the process. She threatens to publicly reveal Sandy’s connection to the killing in exchange for a decent job, while Paul, desperate to rebrand himself and transition to anti-corruption law, inserts himself into the women’s negotiations for the sake of good public relations.These talks unfold in various small and nondescript locations — the film was shot during quarantine — but the drama’s stripped-down, dialogue-heavy approach isn’t entirely an extension of the minimalism that defined many sets at the height of the pandemic. The writer and director Stephen Belber is best known as a playwright, which explains many of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Elegantly composed if ultimately visually bland for the big screen, “What We Do Next” is essentially a series of debates powered by the performers and Belber’s intelligent script, an intricately drawn microcosm of the country’s dynamics of power. The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.What We Do NextNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

This abstract-leaning nonfiction film consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus of communities in Mexico.Onscreen, “Gods of Mexico” is subtitled “a portrait of a nation through its land and peoples,” although its human subjects rarely speak and aren’t identified by name until the end. The director, Helmut Dosantos, making his first feature, eschews context. This abstract-leaning nonfiction film, made from 2013 to 2022, consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus featuring Indigenous residents of Mexico. Chapters are labeled by geographic region and, more obliquely, with the names of Aztec gods.Some of the movie shows life in motion. The camera observes salt harvesters sloshing water in rhythmic synchronization. A shot descends into a crater until all that’s visible is the crater’s floor, which resembles a giant eye.Other stretches of “Gods of Mexico,” which shifts between black-and-white and color, are built from shots that contain barely any motion. A fisherman who has his catch strung from a bamboo trunk carries the beam behind his neck, as the wind ripples across his clothes. A cow-drawn cart and its driver remain surreally in place on a beach as waves lap the shore. Women balance baskets on their heads while standing frozen against a spare, desert-like backdrop.Viewed as still photographs, these images have a raw power, and sound contributes to that effect. But the temporal element of cinema makes the compositions feel mannered and overly posed. (“Just one more second,” you picture the camera operator signaling to the women with baskets.) When, late in the film, miners playing a dice game converse, it only calls attention to how artfully — and perhaps artificially — withholding the preceding scenes have been. This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.Gods of MexicoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

This German drama follows a young Jewish man in early 1940s Berlin who survives by falsifying passports and concealing his identity in public.Before the opening credits in “The Forger,” a brief flash-forward scene shows a young man scampering into a lost and found office. Barging toward the desk, he is promptly reprimanded and ordered to wait his turn. This bathetic prelude is perhaps meant to communicate the man’s impudence, but it also readies the audience for a film of modest ambitions. Set in Berlin in 1942-43, the German period drama is less interested in wartime crises than the daily imbroglios of a life of hiding in plain sight.The film, directed by Maggie Peren, follows the Jewish 21-year-old Cioma Schönhaus (Louis Hofmann), a documents forger sustaining himself on ration coupons, chutzpah and sheer daring alongside his friend, Det (Jonathan Berlin). For a span, the pair reside in Cioma’s family home — their relatives have already been deported — and find that they can enjoy extravagant outings to restaurants and dance clubs by posing as naval officers.The screenplay, which Peren adapted from Schönhaus’s 2008 memoir, unspools with a certain complacency, and often seems to lack an emotional engine. Fleeting moments of suspense or melancholy are undermined by Cioma’s unremitting insouciance — no matter the situation, he wears a smirk — and a series of underwritten relationships muck up the narrative rather than enrich it. Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.The ForgerNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

This documentary shows the plight of one woman as she tries to reunite with her sons and make a permanent home in the United States.When news of the Department of Justice’s zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized entry into the United States came out in mid-2018, a group of moms in Queens sprang into action. They created an organization called Immigrant Families Together, aimed at reuniting mothers held at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona with the children taken from them by the government. “Split at the Root” follows one of these women: Rosayra, an asylum seeker from Guatemala who had crossed into the U.S. with her two sons. The documentary, directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton, is a heartbreaking reminder of the cruelty of these separations, showing that reunification is often only the beginning of a long journey for the families torn apart.Rosayra’s path toward gaining asylum shows the Catch 22 many face: One must be in imminent danger to be admitted as a refugee but must also remember to get a police report from the country they were leaving; immigrants must prove they will not be a burden to the country but are not allowed to work. The emotional toll on the families is acute, including inhumane conditions, bureaucratic hurdles and personal trauma. Before Rosayra meets up with her boys in New York City, her teenage son, Yordy, takes charge of his younger brother, Fernando Jose, and in an interview expresses the challenges of becoming a de facto parent at age 15.“Split at the Root” is a powerful lens into the emotional plight of the thousands of immigrants who cross the border into the United States, the danger they are fleeing and the people trying to help them.Split at the RootNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

In this warm dramedy, a family works together to create a stable routine after their college-age daughter is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.An emerging performer and filmmaker, Alex Heller wrote, directed and stars in “The Year Between” as Clemence Miller, a college sophomore whose erratic behavior gets her booted from school. As a dropout, Clemence returns to her family home in suburban Illinois, under the care of her exasperated but loving parents, Sherri and Don (played endearingly by J. Smith-Cameron and Steve Buscemi.)Sherri drags her daughter to psychiatric consultations, and there, Clemence is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. From this moment of clarity, the film develops into a semi-autobiographical and engaging view of what it’s like for a bellicose youth to adjust to a new mental health diagnosis.Clemence begins new medication, fine-tuning her dosage through trial and error. Her new routine means abstaining from drugs and alcohol, as well as learning new exercise and mindfulness practices. Clemence also has to adapt to moving back in with her family, and she wrestles with the financial reality of working rather than attending university. With so much unappealing change on her plate, Clemence isn’t interested in being a model patient. Her adjustment period includes an impromptu head-shaving, sibling feuds and a fling with an introverted drug dealer.Yet the film is sympathetic to Clemence’s two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach to stability. Heller uses color and production design to establish a warm tone around her occasionally manic protagonist. She creates frames packed with texture, incorporating plush and unpretentious furniture into rooms already cluttered with knickknacks and discarded dishes. Her film’s palette is saturated, lending a glow to characters’ faces even in moments of dysfunction.This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.The Year BetweenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More