A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again.
These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year’s festival, which begins a three-weekend run in Manhattan on Friday, includes 13 features and 79 short films, many of them proudly celebrating girls and women.
Although the slate doesn’t neglect films about boys, among them tales of time-traveling brothers and a boatbuilding father-son team, the choices exalt girl power more than any of the festival’s selections in recent memory.
“A lot of these stories of strong girls and women are true-to-life stories,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. She referred to two films that have their initial festival showings this weekend (every feature has two screening dates): Erica Tanamachi’s live-action documentary “Home Court” follows the Cambodian American basketball player Ashley Chea from her California preparatory school to her freshman year at Princeton, while the animated “Hola, Frida,” by André Kadi and Karine Vézina, draws on the early years of the artist Frida Kahlo.
“Obviously, the story of Frida Kahlo is a story that a lot of people feel like they’re familiar with, but telling it from the perspective of her child self is really interesting,” Villaseñor said.
Delivering unusual fare that young viewers might otherwise miss — short films, offbeat independent cinema, subtitled foreign movies — is a hallmark of the festival, now in its 29th year and one of the largest and broadest of its kind. (It also operates classroom programs and a national touring film slate.) And unlike many film fairs for children, the New York festival, which offers program tickets starting at $17 (a full-festival pass is $135), includes multiple screenings for teenagers and even college students, who can see some of their peers’ work in a showcase on March 15.
The festival, which will be screened at four theaters in Manhattan, is also one of the few for children that is Oscar-qualifying: That means that the short films receiving prizes from its adult jury become eligible for Academy Award consideration. (Two shorts from last year’s festival, “Magic Candies” and “Yuck!,” are vying for best animated short at the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night.)
“A lot of the features this year feel like they are appropriate for kids, but they weren’t necessarily made for kids,” Nina Guralnick, the festival’s executive director, said in an interview. Or, she added, “they are there for everybody in a more expansive way than a kid’s film is traditionally.”
The festival has frequently presented works by acclaimed directors whose careers have included Oscar nominations and wins, among them Chloé Zhao, Danny Boyle and Richard Linklater. This year, the French director Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) will be represented at the festival by the North American premiere of “Maya, Give Me a Title,” a feature that celebrates his relationship with his daughter.
Maya Gondry, 9, easily fits the mold of the festival’s high-spirited female subjects. Because Maya’s father is frequently away filming, the two conceived a communication game that grew out of his humorous smartphone messages. Gondry would ask Maya for a title and then, using cut paper and stop-motion animation, he would create a short film for it in which she was the heroine.
“Maya, Give Me a Title” consists of about a dozen of the resulting adventures — “Maya in the Ocean With a Bottle of Ketchup,” “Maya and the Thieving Cats” — interspersed with live-action sequences of the irrepressible Maya herself.
“She could see that the more complicated the titles were, the more convoluted the stories were, and she would play with that,” Gondry said in a recent video interview from Berlin, where the film was showing at the Berlinale. He added that he enjoyed the rough-edged look of stop-motion, in which “my concept would come across more if the execution was not perfect.”
The embrace of a handcrafted aesthetic over a computer-generated one has emerged in other festival entries, Villaseñor said. It appears in short films like André Carrilho’s “The Girl With the Occupied Eyes” (hand-drawn animation of the wildness surrounding a child obliviously glued to her cellphone) as well as in additional features, like the festival’s centerpiece, Isaiah Saxon’s “The Legend of Ochi.”
That film’s teenage heroine, Yuri (Helena Zengel), defies her father (Willem Dafoe) to save a baby ochi, a fictional creature that resembles a cross between a marmoset and a koala. Working with John Nolan Studio, Saxon opted to use animatronics and puppetry almost exclusively to depict the ochi, which he envisioned as inhabiting an island in the Black Sea.
“Our brain can easily latch onto the illusion of reality when we’re seeing a puppet,” Saxon said in a video interview from California. This is especially true of the portrayal of very young animals, he added, because they don’t move smoothly. “They’re just figuring out how to control their bodies,” he said. “And the same thing happens in a puppet. You know, the little tiny wiggles that get passed through the hand.”
Although the festival’s directors never dictate a theme — film trends simply surface — they actively seek titles that are “celebrating cultural diversity rather than seeing it as a threat,” Villaseñor said. This year’s offerings, which represent 35 countries, include Soleen Yusef’s “Winners,” in which Mona (Dileyla Agirman), a Kurdish immigrant from Syria, finds sport as a universal language for bonding with her new classmates in Germany. In “Home Court,” Chea has initially developed her basketball skills through the Japanese American leagues that were founded in response to the American exclusion of Asian players, particularly just after World War II.
In the United States, “the wonderment is cultivating all of these cultures and all of these identities together in one space,” Tanamachi, the film’s director, said during a video conversation from California. “And I think this film truly celebrates that.” (Tanamachi will be one of 38 filmmakers visiting the festival for Q&A sessions.)
The festival’s embrace of diversity extends to portrayals of young people with disabilities, as in Leonard Mink’s short film “Tremolo,” about a deaf boy finding a common language with his musician father, and in Shinnosuke Yakuwa’s animated feature “Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window,” based on a Japanese memoir about growing up in the 1940s with traits that might now be described as being on the autism spectrum.
“The work we’re doing has been important for kids for the 29 years we’ve been doing it, and will continue to be,” Guralnick said. She added, “We have this opportunity to really expand kids’ sense of themselves and of the world.”
And of what movies are.
New York International Children’s Film Festival
Feb. 28-March 16; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org.
