Animal Transformations / More highlights for children and young people / Children Make Films: The CineKids Club at the Brüder-Grimm School

Children feel a strong connection to animals, in a different way to adults. It is therefore no surprise that animals play a very significant role in children’s and youth films. In this year’s Children’s and Youth Film Competition, animals and animal characters make their presence felt in a striking number of films. And not in the typical Disney way.

In all three films, animals are a way to confront the young protagonists with death. In others, the animal embodies the ‘other’ – that which does not fit into what society demands of a child or young person. The animal can also offer a kid the pleasure of not being judged or graded. Animals simply aren’t interested in maths lessons. That, too, is reassuring. In Kun Zhu De Gou (A Trapped Dog, USA), Keke is under immense pressure from school exams. A stray dog offers a way out. Keke befriends him; whether this is real or in his imagination remains open to interpretation. In doing so, he escapes a performance-obsessed environment, staged by director Xinying Lao as a bleak and hostile concrete landscape. In the end, Keke completes his transformation into an animal and thus escapes the punitive pressure of the adult world.

Kun Zhu De Gou tells the story of an outsider, and many of the films in the children’s and youth film competition actually focus on outsiders. Andrea Walter’s darkly melancholic vampire short film daylight (USA), for example, is one of them. But so too is the heart-warming El Mandado (The Favour) by Ingrid Paola Bonilla Rodriguez from Colombia – a little rom-com: The fun-loving farmer’s son Wilmar lives with his family in the mountains. He milks cows, loves life on the farm and wants to become a farmer, just like his late father. Everything is fine, really, but at school Wilmar is teased and is also – at first unhappily – in love. Before long, however, he learns how to embrace his heritage.

Kosmogonia (dir. Karolina Chabier, France) as well as dipolar bipolar (dir. Quankai Li, Japan) also have a certain intoxicating quality in their exuberant colours, brimming with fluid associations within their fantasy worlds. The title of Kosmogonia hints at it: it is about a small cosmology – a billy goat and a bull and the entire universe, from single-celled organisms to heaven. In dipolar bipolar, by contrast, the universe is a single head, or rather a single soul. We like to attribute human characteristics to animals. That is also why the comparatively simple, often stereotypical anthropomorphism works so well in Disney films, for example. dipolar bipolar, however, rigorously strips away any potential for kitsch and explains this duality – joie de vivre and sadness, productivity and depression – using a dog and a cat. With no educational intentions, it is a complex and contradictory stream of consciousness, from which everyone will perceive and remember different things.

All the animal characters in the competition (and indeed all the films in the competition) have one thing in common: they are all free from kitsch and from cheap feel-good sentiment that audiences of any age would not take seriously. Instead, they all offer a surprising, complex perspective on the world. The result is a series of visually stunning and intense images and montages.

Benjamin Moldenhauer

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Several members of this year’s children’s jury make films themselves, as part of the CineKids Club at the Oberhausen Brüder-Grimm School. We wanted to find out more, so we arranged an interview with the club’s leader, Andreas Puchar, and his film team. Mr. Puchar brought this club to the Brüder-Grimm School in 2019, having already gained experience with the project as a student assistant at the Sehsternchen agency in Oberhausen. He sees the practical work with the medium of film and the freedom to shape the films as particularly educational, as this trains the children’s understanding of media almost by itself. In production, he works closely with editor Johannes Fritsche (whose credits include Germany from Above, Gangster Runner and The Wild Philippines); the club also collaborates with our festival cinema, the Lichtburg in Oberhausen: When they start, they always get an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the cinema and one free cinema ticket. The CineKids are also supported by Caritas.

When the children arrived, the room filled with sheer excitement. The ten children taking part in the club look forward to working on their own film every week. “I’m taking part because I like making films, and I’ve never done anything like this before – it’s always been my dream,” said Jodie. Ikhlas said something similar: “I want to be an actress and I’ve always wanted to make films.” When asked why she wants to make films, she replied: “I watch lots of films myself and I’ve even seen behind-the-scenes videos on YouTube, so I wanted to give it a go.”

When we asked them exactly how they came up with the story for their film, lots of hands went up. Ikhlas started and told us how they’d developed the idea: “We split into groups of three, and each group came up with a story; then we decided together which one was the best.” The winning story was one in which there is a sudden power cut at the school. When the lights come back on, one of the pupils has disappeared. Jodie took over the next part of the story: “After that, we – the other pupils – go looking for the missing person.” Tina added: “The missing pupil was locked in the cupboard by a ghost. While we’re looking for the pupil, the ghost scares us and we tell our teacher, Mrs. Screamstone. But she doesn’t believe us.” Eventually, the teacher goes looking herself and encounters the ghost too. How it ends remains a secret – no spoilers!

When we asked who had come up with the idea, everyone unanimously pointed to Nour, who looked visibly proud. There isn’t a fixed script; the scenes are always planned and filmed on the day itself, because that’s exactly how the children want it. Lara explained how the casting worked: “In Nour’s story, there were two set roles. The ghost and the teacher. Andreas asked us who wanted to play these roles, then we were allowed to put our hands up. But he didn’t tell us, ‘You have to play this role, or anything like that.” During filming, as with any film production, there are certainly several takes at times: The children watch each scene straight after filming, and if not everyone is happy with the result, they film it again, as Tina explained. She described a day of filming “We also do the make-up for the ghost. We already have an idea of how things should go from there. Then we talk it through and combine our ideas. After that, it usually happens quite quickly and we start filming.”

Everyone is clearly enjoying the film production. Ikhlas said: “I can see how the camera works and act in front of it.” Lara, for her part, was particularly delighted that, in her role as a teacher, she gets to tell the pupils off. Andreas Puchar added that Lara always prepared very carefully for her role as a teacher. She would arrive half an hour early, put on her make-up and get dressed, and once she was in character, she always approached the shoot with a great deal of confidence.

There are a few aspects of film production that the children don’t like all that much: it’s annoying when the others aren’t as focused on the task at hand. Others also told us that they were sometimes afraid of being in front of the camera or couldn’t concentrate properly and always started laughing. And not everyone likes the fact that Mr. Puchar sometimes takes longer with the technical side of things or that putting on make-up takes time. Despite all this, the children all seem very confident and excited. We’re sure that their hard work will be rewarded in the end, when they can proudly present their film to the other classes!

Cora Horstmann

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