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      'Great Freedom': Film Traces Long Shadow of Anti-Gay Law in Germany

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      A new film traces the many decades it took to abolish Paragraph 175, a measure criminalizing sex between men that was strengthened by the Nazis.BERLIN — A turning point arrives for Viktor and Hans, the central characters in the new film “Great Freedom,” when Viktor sees the concentration camp tattoo on Hans’s arm.It’s 1945, and Viktor has already forcibly thrown Hans out of the cell they share in a German prison after learning that Hans was jailed for having sex with men. But when Viktor, an ice block of a man with a murder conviction, discovers the tattooed number, he offers to give Hans a new design to cover up the past.“They put you from a concentration camp into the slammer? Seriously?” Victor (Georg Friedrich) stammers in disbelief, more to himself than to Hans (Franz Rogowski).The fictional character of Hans, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II only to be sent directly to prison, is based on a chilling and often overlooked chapter in German postwar history.Hans is repeatedly arrested under Paragraph 175, a law criminalizing sex between men that the Nazis expanded just a couple of years into their regime, and which was kept on the books for decades after.The law was used, sometimes with elaborate sting operations, to convict up to 50,000 gay men in West Germany between 1945 and 1994 — roughly as many as were arrested during the decade in which the Nazis used it.“For gay men, the Nazi era did not end in 1945,” said Peter Rehberg, the archivist of Schwules Museum, a gay cultural institution in Berlin.When Sebastian Meise, the director of “Great Freedom,” read about the men who went from the concentration camps to prison because of their sexuality, it “really changed my understanding of history,” he said in a telephone interview from Vienna. The discovery set him off on an eight-year project that resulted in “Great Freedom,” which was Austria’s submission to the international feature category at this year’s Oscars.Modern Germany has been praised for its efforts to keep the dreadful memory of the Holocaust present for the generations born after what Hannah Arendt called the “break in civilization.” The Nazi era is a mandatory part of school history curriculums, for example, and many schoolchildren and police cadets are obliged to visit former concentration camps. But for many decades, postwar Germany’s treatment of gay men was also neither liberal nor progressive.In 1935, the Nazis strengthened Germany’s law criminalizing homosexuality, which was originally introduced in the 1870s. This allowed the regime to criminalize not just gay sex, but almost any behavior that could be seen to run afoul of heterosexual norms, including looking at another man. While East Germany had a slightly less restrictive version on its books, West Germany kept the strict Nazi legislation until 1969, when it was first reformed.Peter Bermbach at his home in Paris. He left West Germany in 1960 after being imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesFor West Germans like Peter Bermbach, Paragraph 175 cast a long shadow over the postwar decades.In his senior year of high school in West Germany in the late 1940s, he was overheard turning down a date with another boy. School officials did not just suspend him, they also reported him to the police.“It was the typical German sense of order and justice of the time,” said Bermbach, now 90, in a telephone interview.The second time, he didn’t get off as easily. At 29, with a Ph.D. and a job in a publishing house, he was caught putting his arm around a 17-year-old at a public pool. Bermbach spent four weeks in jail and was fined 5,000 marks — a hefty sum at the time.After he paid off the fine, he became one of the thousands of gay and bisexual men who fled Paragraph 175. He moved to Paris in 1960 in search of more freedoms.Meise and his writing partner Thomas Reider collected many stories from Bermbach’s generation of gay men during the six years they spent researching and writing the script for “Great Freedom,” visiting the archives at the Schwules Museum and the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which collects interviews with men affected by the law.Still, Paragraph 175 did not stop gay culture from evolving in Western Germany; the German title of the film, “Grosse Freiheit,” is a nod to a venerable gay bar in Berlin where the penultimate scene takes place. But it did push many aspects of gay life underground, according to Klaus Schumann, 84. He remembered Berlin police pulling up in large vans in front of bars known to be gay hot spots in the late ’40s and ’50s. No one was criminally charged, he said, but everyone, including staff, were taken to the local police station to to be identified.“It was basically a way to keep control over people,” Schuman said.Hans (Franz Rogowski) first arrives at the prison in 1945 after being held in a Nazi concentration camp.MUBI“Great Freedom” traces Hans’s many stints behind bars, where he was labeled a “175,” jumping between 1945 and 1969. To help mark that time shift, Rogowski lost more than 25 pounds during filming, to make himself appear younger (the later scenes were filmed first). Shooting in an abandoned prison close to Magdeburg in the former East Germany, Meise captures the slow course of incarcerated time, as well as social change.“I would be very pleased if it was taken as a universal story,” Meise said of his film. “It’s so hard to disentangle the history and the current politics because it’s so virulent.” Meise noted that the issue is far from being a purely historical one, as there seem to be new pushes to reinforce heterosexual norms in places like some U.S. schools.For the men whose lives were affected by Paragraph 175, much has changed. After he settled in Paris, Bermbach built a career as a journalist and filmmaker. Last year he wrote an autobiography, and later this month the high school that kicked him out more than seven decades ago has invited him to visit and read from the book.“Honestly, I don’t really care,” Barmbach said of going back to the place that once expelled him. “As for being denounced for being homosexual, I’ve long forgotten about that.”After Paragraph 175 was reformed in 1969 and again in 1973, the last vestige of it was taken off the books in 1994. In 2017, a year after Meise started writing “Great Freedom,” the German parliament said anyone charged under the law would have their record expunged. It also agreed to offer a meager settlement to those who applied.Of the 50,000 men who might have eligible, only 317 had applied by last summer. More

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      Alan Ladd Jr., Hitmaking Film Executive, Dies at 84

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      When other studios didn’t want it, he took on the project that became “Star Wars.” He later guided “Chariots of Fire,” “Young Frankenstein” and numerous other movies.Alan Ladd Jr., who as a producer and studio executive was a guiding hand behind scores of successful films, none bigger than “Star Wars,” which he championed when its young director, George Lucas, was having trouble getting it made, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84.Kathie Berlin, who worked with him for years at his production company and at MGM, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Ladd was vice president for creative affairs at 20th Century Fox in 1973 when Mr. Lucas’s agent, Jeff Berg, began talking with him about Mr. Lucas’s still-evolving concept for what became “Star Wars.” Mr. Lucas had just made “American Graffiti,” but it had yet to be released (once it was, it would become one of 1973’s biggest movies), and so Mr. Lucas’s idea for a space movie wasn’t getting much respect; United Artists and Universal weren’t interested.Mr. Ladd, though, was. He knew movies and audiences — his father was an actor who had been in more than 100 films and TV shows — and he understood the appeal of Mr. Lucas’s vision.“It took me back to the old Saturday matinees,” he told The New York Times in 1977 as “Star Wars,” released a few months earlier, was smashing box-office records. “I used to go crazy over Superman and Flash Gordon. When I heard Universal had passed on it, I thought, ‘They’re crazy!’ So I took an option on it.”From left, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977), which Mr. Ladd agreed to make when other studios weren’t interested.Lucas FilmsIt wasn’t the first time Mr. Ladd had seen potential where others did not. A few years earlier Mel Brooks was shopping his idea for “Young Frankenstein,” but Columbia balked when he insisted on shooting the movie in black and white. Mr. Brooks then sat down with Mr. Ladd.“We all hit it off at our first meeting because the first thing Laddie” — Mr. Ladd’s nickname — “said was, ‘You’re absolutely right. It should be made in black and white,’” Mr. Brooks wrote in his book “All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business” (2021).“I knew right then and there,” Mr. Brooks added, “that I had finally met a studio chief that I could really trust.”Mr. Brooks went on to make several other movies with Mr. Ladd, including the “Star Wars” parody “Spaceballs” in 1987, when Mr. Ladd was chairman of MGM. By then Mr. Brooks was box-office gold, thanks in part to “Young Frankenstein,” which had earned more than $100 million, and, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, he could have taken “Spaceballs” to just about any major studio.“But I’ve known Laddie for years,” he said. “And I’m not so wise, so old or so powerful that I can resist a lot of gut-level help all the way down the line — and especially emotional support — which is something Laddie has always provided.”Gene Wilder, left, and Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974). Mr. Ladd supported Mr. Brooks’s insistence on making the film in black and white.20th Century FoxMr. Ladd, who at various times held top positions at 20th Century Fox and MGM/UA as well as running the Ladd Company, which he founded in 1979, was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives. In a 1999 interview with The New York Times, the director Norman Jewison recalled his experience working with Mr. Ladd on the 1987 hit “Moonstruck,” which won three Oscars.“I gave him a price of what I thought I could do the film for,” Mr. Jewison said, “and told him I was going to go after Cher to play the lead. No other major stars. And he called me up and said, ‘OK.’ And I never saw him again, until I told him that the film was finished and I wanted him to see it. That doesn’t happen anymore.”Ms. Berlin said that while Mr. Ladd’s championing of “Star Wars” may be his calling card, he also deserved credit for backing films like “Moonstruck,” “Julia” (1977) and “Thelma and Louise” (1991) that had strong female characters. He is generally credited with suggesting that the lead character in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979), originally written as a man, be changed, giving Sigourney Weaver a chance to create a memorable sci-fi heroine.“I am always asking, ‘Can this role be more interesting if it’s played by a woman rather than a man?’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.Mr. Ladd in 2007. He was known for a relatively laid-back style in a business full of intrusive executives.Misha Erwitt for The New York TimesAlan Walbridge Ladd Jr. was born on Oct. 22, 1937, in Los Angeles to Alan Ladd, best known as the star of the 1953 western “Shane,” and his first wife, Marjorie Jane Harrold.Alan Jr. studied at the University of Southern California, was called up as an Air Force reservist during the Berlin crisis of the early 1960s and, once released, went to work in the mailroom of the talent agency Creative Management Associates. He soon became an agent, representing, among others, Judy Garland.In the early 1970s he formed a producing partnership in London with several others and produced his first movies, including “The Nightcomers” (1971), which starred Marlon Brando.Returning to the United States, he became a vice president at Fox in 1973. In 1976 he became the company’s president. Three years later he announced that he was leaving to form his own company.Mr. Ladd was a top executive at MGM twice. In 1985 he was brought in to run one of its movie divisions; soon after that he was named president and chief operating officer, and then chairman. He left in 1988 with the company undergoing ownership and organizational changes. He was leading the movie division of Pathé Communications when that company acquired MGM, and in 1991 he became chief executive. He was forced out in 1993 in another ownership change.Among the movies the Ladd Company had a hand in was “Chariots of Fire” (1981), which won the best-picture Oscar. “Braveheart” (1995), another Ladd Company project, won the same award.But “Star Wars” was almost certainly Mr. Ladd’s biggest triumph. He was still unsure about whether the film would work when he attended the premiere in San Francisco — until he heard the tidal wave of applause at the end.“It kept going on; it wasn’t stopping,” he recalled later. “And I just never had experienced that kind of reaction to any movie ever. Finally, when it was over, I had to get up and walk outside because of the tears.”Mr. Ladd’s marriage to Patricia Beazley ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Cindra Pincock. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Kelliann Ladd, Tracy Ladd and Amanda Ladd Jones; a brother, David; a sister, Carol Lee Veitch; and six grandchildren. A daughter from his second marriage, Chelsea Ladd, died in 2021. More

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      ‘Dear Mr. Brody’ Review: Spreading the Wealth Doesn’t Go Smoothly

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      The scion of a margarine empire says to ask him for money. And many, many people asked.In January 1970, Michael Brody Jr. announced he’d share his $25 million inheritance. All people had to do was ask — and ask they did. Archival news footage in “Dear Mr. Brody,” a documentary directed by Keith Maitland, shows a line of hopefuls outside and inside 1650 Broadway where Brody, 21, the groovy scion of the Jelke margarine empire, opened an office.Journalists were drawn to his peace-love-and-understanding worldview. Filmmakers, too, among them the movie producer Ed Pressman, who had hoped to make a fiction film. People also wrote letters: tens of thousands of them.“Dear Mr. Brody” invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity. While Brody leverages his stunningly brief moment in the limelight — appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” securing a record deal, finding quite the platform for his messages — a scene of him tossing cash out a window to a crowd below hints at an underlying ugliness. “Food. Shelter. Love,” he snappishly tells a reporter later. “They don’t need money.”“Dear Mr. Brody” nods to and teases the era’s psychedelic tendencies. (“Brody Says Drugs Inspired Giveaway,” reads a New York Times headline.) Interviewees who had been on the journey — among them, wife, Renee Brody, and friend Michael Aronin — share some of its vexing details. Brody died in 1973. But the film’s exquisite pathos comes as Melissa Robyn Glassman, a producer, discovers a cache of unopened letters in Pressman’s storage unit. Her sleuthing leads to letter writers — or their children — and those interviews are quietly stunning. It might be hard to upstage Brody, yet they do.Dear Mr. BrodyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Farrah Forke, Who Played a Helicopter Pilot on ‘Wings,’ Dies at 54

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      Forke, the namesake of a not-yet-famous family friend named Farrah Fawcett, played Alex Lambert on three seasons of the popular sitcom, a fixture of the NBC schedule in the 1990s.Farrah Forke, the actress who catapulted to fame playing a helicopter pilot on the NBC sitcom “Wings,” died at her home in Texas on Friday. She was 54.Her death was confirmed by her mother, Beverly Talmage, who said in a statement that her daughter had had cancer for several years.Forke played the alluring pilot Alex Lambert on three seasons of “Wings,” which aired from 1990 to 1997 and followed the adventures of the offbeat characters at a small airport on Nantucket.Her character’s affections were battled over by Joe and Brian Hackett (Tim Daly and Steven Weber), brothers who ran a one-plane airline.On Instagram, Weber described Forke as “every bit as tough, fun, beautiful and grounded as her character ‘Alex’ on Wings.”Farrah Rachael Forke was born on Jan. 12, 1968, in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Chuck Forke and Beverly (Mendleski) Forke. She was named after Farrah Fawcett, a family friend who wasn’t a well-known actress at the time Forke was born.“They just liked the name,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News in 1993.Forke began her acting career with a role in a Texas production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” In 1989, she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute in Manhattan.Her acting career took off when she joined “Wings” as the smart and saucy Alex.“I don’t mind playing pretty women,” Forke told The Dallas Morning News. “But I do mind playing bimbos. Alex is definitely a sexy woman. But she’s also focused, and there’s a lot of qualities about her that people will admire.”The show, which was created by the “Cheers” and “Frasier” writers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, ran for 172 episodes and was a mainstay of the NBC schedule for years. The show also starred Crystal Bernard, Tony Shalhoub and Thomas Haden Church.From 1994 to 1995, Forke had a recurring role as the lawyer Mayson Drake on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” on ABC.Her other television acting roles included “Dweebs,” “Mr. Rhodes” and “Party of Five.” After making her film debut in “Brain Twisters” in 1991, she appeared in “Disclosure” (1994), directed by Barry Levinson, and “Heat” (1995), directed by Michael Mann.Later in her career, she supplied the voice of Big Barda on the DC Animated Universe television series “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League Unlimited.”Forke had health problems related to leakage from her silicone breast implants, which she had implanted in 1989. She had them removed in 1993 and then filed a lawsuit a year later against the manufacturer and her doctor for damages, noting that neither the implant makers nor her doctor properly warned her of possible complications, according to The Associated Press.In addition to her mother, Forke is survived by her twin sons, Chuck and Wit Forke; her stepfather, Chuck Talmage; and three sisters, Paige Inglis, Jennifer Sailor and Maggie Talmage.Kirsten Noyes More

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      ‘Great Freedom’ Review: Unbroken

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      In this moving period drama, a German gay man repeatedly declares his independence in a country that criminalizes his desire and his identity.The first time you see the exhilaratingly stubborn hero of “Great Freedom,” he is moving around a grubby public bathroom. Fit and jaggedly handsome, with short hair and sideburns, he looks coiled with impatience, restless yet confident. A trim mustache frames his sensual mouth, and his biceps are set off by his short sleeves. He paces, occasionally drawing on a cigarette, and at one point stands in the open doorway looking out, as if waiting for someone.Other men soon enter the bathroom and with shared, feverish purpose and practiced gestures, they and Hans (the indispensable Franz Rogowski) have sex, a basic human act, if one that challenges the state. It’s 1968 and the West German law known as Paragraph 175 prohibits sex between men, with offenders subject to imprisonment. Incorporated into the German criminal code in the 1870s, the law was expanded and viciously enforced by the Nazis; shockingly, a version remained on the West German books for decades after the war.Low key, affecting and insistently unsentimental, “Great Freedom” is a fictional story of resistance against this inhumane law, a story of salvation told one caress and sexual encounter at a time. For Hans, the bathroom is a refuge, a necessity, a pleasure zone and merely one of the many restricted, otherwise unloved spaces — almost all in prison — that he occupies and, in his way, liberates. Shortly after the movie opens, he is sentenced to two years without probation, a penalty that he doesn’t bother to challenge in court. Hans has his own way of protesting: He loves and has sex with who he wants, when he wants, how he wants.And he does so again and again as the years and prison terms slip into one another. He falls in love, has different partners and lives his life. There are beautiful, ugly and nondescript men, alternately caring and cruel lovers. Hans opens himself to these different souls even as he keeps to himself, generally revealing little to others. He’s beaten and abused, and keeps on going. He paces and smokes in the yard, and is repeatedly thrown into solitary to languish in a hellish, unlit pit. As the punishments and years mount and his hair turns gray, you wonder how he can stand it. Until, that is, you remember that outside is a type of prison, too.The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm. Emotions run predictably hot in the prison — there are beatings and a horrible death — but Meise doesn’t amp the violence or use it as a crutch. Instead, he uses the prison’s claustrophobia, its confining rooms and darkness, and Rogowski’s immaculately controlled performance to create an aura of intimate reserve that draws you to Hans, though at a slight remove. You grow fond of Hans, but you also remain an outsider, watching as he weathers prison, faces existential threats and finds furtive joys.These hard-won pleasures are sprinkled across the story’s two well-paced episodic hours, which jump around in time and span several decades. Kinked timelines have become a wretched cliché, but here the jumbled chronology expresses the associative flow of memory, how one face evokes another and one touch summons up a lost world. In one flashback, Hans appears as a wincingly thin captive who, after serving time in a Nazi concentration camp, has now been imprisoned by the Allies. In another flashback it’s 1957 and Hans is now buoyed by his relationship with Oskar (Thomas Prenn), who’s nowhere as resilient.There are other men and other entanglements, including with a sweet-faced young schoolteacher (Anton von Lucke), whom Hans meets in that bathroom in 1968 and later poignantly serves time with. Hans’s most consistent if unlikely relationship, though, is with Viktor (a fantastic Georg Friedrich), a rough, brutishly charismatic slab of a man serving a life sentence for murder. Covered with jailhouse tattoos and plagued by a series of sad, greasy haircuts, Victor is at once repulsed and transparently captivated by Hans. For his part, Hans carefully navigates the other man with his well-honed faculty for self-preservation.“Great Freedom” is an unexpectedly tender movie. This gentleness is a welcome relief — narratively, emotionally — from the canned barbarism of many prison movies, with their exploitative jolts, their shanks, cruelties and grim, casual sexual violence. It’s also fundamentally political. The inmates brutalize one another, but there’s love here, too; the most horrific violence originates from the prison itself and, by extension, the state that dehumanizes these men (or tries to), criminalizing both their desires and their very personhood.Meise and Reider don’t burden the characters with chest-thumping or expository speeches; there are no title cards crammed with encyclopedic histories or triumphant flag waving. One of the few nods in the movie toward the future (though this may be a matter of translation) is tucked into a prisoner’s plaintive question: “Why do you always act up, Hans?” He does, unreservedly, but part of his appeal is that he doesn’t always say what he thinks, which intensifies your interest. Other people are invariably a mystery, but one thing you do know: Even as the world closes around him, legally and physically, Hans remains free.Great FreedomNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ Review: A Cosmic View of Hawaii

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      This experimental documentary takes viewers on a psychedelic tour of Hawaii, exploring the tension between scientific inquiry and Indigenous preservation.Fern Silva’s debut feature “Rock Bottom Riser,” an experimental documentary that explores humans’ relationship to nature in Hawaii, brings awareness to how the planned construction of a 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, the archipelago’s most sacred mountain, could have damaging effects on Indigenous communities.The film is a psychedelic tour of the islands, jumping from image to image and interweaving voice-overs or scenes with lectures on the cosmology, astronomy, history and science of Hawaii. Through some of its images and narration, it urges viewers to consider the ways in which science can be a colonizing force, further marginalizing native Hawaiians and their traditional modes of inquiry while helping to criminalize their dissent. In one scene, an unidentified narrator says that attempts by Indigenous people to guard the mountain have been reported as “threatening violent acts” by astronomers, leading to police intervention.Silva presents a Hawaii likely unfamiliar to tourists, relying not on beach landscapes but on volcanic lava, mountainscapes and dense forests. Viewers can hear a car rev offscreen while palm trees swing at sunset. Elsewhere, two men fill a smoke shop with oversized Os created with the smoke from their vapes. Silva jumps from the cosmos, to a surfer catching a wave, to historical documents and equations. These visuals, which sometimes clash, show humans’ tenuous relationship with nature.The film is sometimes hard to follow, because the connection between the images and the voice-overs is not always clear. But taken as a whole, “Rock Bottom Riser” leaves viewers with a strong sense of how native Hawaiians view themselves and their future, and encourages inquiry into how their land might be preserved.Rock Bottom RiserNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lucy and Desi’ Review: Love in the Time of Television

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      This documentary, directed by Amy Poehler and about the dynamic duo behind “I Love Lucy,” favors the good times over the difficult ones.The filmmakers of the lightweight documentary “Lucy and Desi” benefited from an embarrassment of riches. Over many years, in hundreds of hours of footage, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz enacted a simulacrum of their domestic life in “I Love Lucy.” In her chronicle of the duo’s romance and work, the director, Amy Poehler, draws liberally from this trove.These television clips are the most evocative and transporting elements of the documentary, which in spite of its material offers limited insight into its central couple. Talking-head interviews with historians and children of the pair’s collaborators usher us through the decades at a clipped pace that, along with the distance of elapsed time, gives the story an impersonal feel. Joyful periods take heavy precedence over misfortunes, and some difficult topics, such as Arnaz’s womanizing, come up only obliquely.But the movie’s most frustrating choices concern Ball’s registration with the Communist Party, a scandal that takes center stage in the biopic “Being the Ricardos.” Poehler merely touches on the episode’s most familiar details before using it as a jumping off point to describe Arnaz’s escape from Cuba. We learn that Arnaz’s father, a wealthy mayor under the Gerardo Machado administration, was arrested during the revolution. Rather than demystify these politics or investigate where Ball’s views differed from Arnaz’s, the movie takes pains to underline Arnaz’s disdain for Communism and appreciation for the United States.Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.Lucy and DesiRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      At New York Children’s Film Festival, the Films Come First

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      The New York International Children’s Film Festival returns with a diverse, sophisticated slate, including Richard Linklater’s animated take on the 1969 moon landing.When Chloé Zhao won the Academy Awards for best director and best picture for “Nomadland” last year, some who felt special pride were neither her relatives nor her film industry collaborators. These delighted fans were the team behind the annual New York International Children’s Film Festival, which in 2011 showed one of Zhao’s earliest projects: “Daughters,” a 10-minute short about a 14-year-old Chinese girl being forced into an arranged marriage.The festival, whose 25th-anniversary edition begins on Friday evening at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, has long showcased filmmakers who either go on to distinguished careers or have already achieved them. This year’s opening-night titles include “Where Is Anne Frank,” a haunting animated feature about children affected by wars past and present, from the award-winning Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”). On March 19, the festival will close with “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by the acclaimed American filmmaker Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”), who will conduct a livestreamed Q. and A. with the audience.“We are a film festival first,” Nina Guralnick, the organization’s executive director, said in a video interview. In choosing sophisticated works, she added, “we want the program and the experience to be part of a continuum of film appreciation and film discovery, and not kind of segmented as something for kids.”This year, Guralnick and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, are confronting the challenges of the pandemic by presenting both in-person screenings — almost all at the SVA Theater — and virtual offerings. Although the 20 features and more than 60 shorts make up a robust and global slate (this year includes the festival’s first film from Kyrgyzstan), the programmers will host fewer screenings, showing some titles in the theater only once, and others only online.“Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” is an animated examination of the 1969 moon landing by Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”).NetflixThe streaming works, which will be available through April 3 — past the festival’s official end date — will include all those for children under 5, who are still too young to be vaccinated against Covid-19. This year, however, also gives children ages 3 to 5 a broader range of short films than in the past, as well as a feature: the Swedish director Michael Ekblad’s “Best Birthday Ever,” an animated tale about a kindergarten rabbit who must cope with a baby sister.“We really wanted to get back into the theater this year, if we could safely,” Guralnick said. And while circumstances won’t allow in-person award festivities, the festival will still feature its audience-choice and jury prizes. (It is one of the few Oscar-qualifying children’s festivals, meaning that its prizewinning shorts are eligible for Academy Award consideration.)This year, one of the programming highlights is animation, which Villaseñor described as a way to give young audiences “a different point of access” to subjects that might otherwise be too harsh.“Charlotte,” for instance, a feature by the Canadian directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin, uses painterly animation to illuminate the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, a young German Jewish artist — voiced by Keira Knightley — who died at Auschwitz.Folman also chose intricate animation for “Where Is Anne Frank” because, he said in a phone interview, it offers “endless opportunity to do crosses between reality and imagination, between conscious and subconscious, between dreams and true stories.” Folman undertakes all of these in the film, which focuses not on Anne but on Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne’s diary was addressed. Kitty emerges from the journal as a girl in contemporary Amsterdam, traveling across time to learn what happened to her friend. During her quest, she encounters refugee children who reflect Anne’s legacy.“I don’t look at it as a Holocaust movie,” Folman said. “I look at it as a coming-of-age movie.”The festival, however, does not neglect animation’s affinity for the wildly comic. In Domee Shi’s “Turning Red,” from Disney and Pixar, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl transforms into a big red panda whenever she’s too excited.“Oink,” Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a pet piglet.Viking Film/A Private ViewOther boisterous travails occur in “Oink,” the Dutch director Mascha Halberstad’s stop-motion feature about a little girl with an imperiled pet piglet. But this is no “Charlotte’s Web.” Oink, the piglet, makes an indelible mark in not always welcome ways — housebreaking is an issue — and Babs, his owner, has her hands full, especially with a visiting grandfather obsessed with a sausage-making contest. Halberstad, who will attend the festival with the producer Marleen Slot for a Q. and A. on Friday, explained in a video interview that she was aiming for a tone like that of Roald Dahl because “he doesn’t underestimate children.” Though the film ends happily, “it has a bit of an edge,” she said.The festival also offers titles that capture an interplay between art and science. “I wanted to eliminate the divide between them,” Villaseñor said, “and have people realize how vitally important the creativity in the arts is to innovating in the sciences.”“Gagarine,” for instance, a poignant, inspiring movie that was selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, mingles a teenager’s passion for space exploration with his desire to have a home. The first feature from the young French directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, the film was shot at the real Cité Gagarine, a housing project outside of Paris that was torn down in 2019.“We were really roommates with the demolition team,” Trouilh said as he sat next to Liatard in a video call from Paris. Their fictional protagonist, Youri (Alséni Bathily), refuses to leave, constructing for himself an elaborate kind of secret space capsule in the shadow of the wrecking ball.“Because of the empty space left by the absence of his parents,” Liatard said, “we imagine that space is the thing that is a refuge for Youri.”Alséni Bathily in “Gagarine,” about a teenager’s passion for space exploration. It was shot at a Paris housing project that was torn down in 2019.Cohen Media GroupMore technology-fueled dreams appear not only in Linklater’s “Apollo 10½,” in which another boy imagines himself lifting off, but also in the festival’s annual shorts program “Girls P.O.V.,” which this year features young female science pioneers, real and imagined. Still other budding innovators occupy the spotlight in Thomas Verrette’s documentary “Zero Gravity,” about diverse middle school students in a NASA coding competition.Such films capture the enduring principles of the festival, which was founded by Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro, parents who in 1997 made a commitment to offering children more independent and less commercial fare.“We’ve wanted to help kids dream beyond the limitations of their own reality,” Guralnick said. Through the festival’s many iterations, she added, “we’ve been trying to be a gateway for children for 25 years to what they envision the future to be, to what they envision their world to be — should be, can be.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 4-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More