Celebrate summer with Tel Aviv Children’s Film Festival and Animix
Two upcoming events will help your children and your whole family to thrive during the summer vacation, not just get through it.
By HANNAH BROWN‘MOOMINS’(photo credit: Courtesy)
Two upcoming events will help your children and your whole family to thrive during the summer vacation, not just get through it: The 15th Tel Aviv International Children’s Film Festival and Animix, the International Festival of Animation, Comics and Cartoons, both of which will take place at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque.The children’s film festival will take place this year from July 16-20. Its slogan is, “Children conquer the screen,” and there will be more than 60 screenings of films from Israel and dozens of countries around the world for children and teens.Gila Almagor Agmon, the honorary president of the festival and an actress and director whose films have always focused strongly on children, is celebrating her 80th birthday this year and the festival will be celebrating along with her in a special event at the festival opening.The opening film will be Chuskit (which is translated into Hebrew as The Girl from the Himalayas), a movie about a spirited paraplegic girl in a remote village who comes into conflict with her tradition-bound grandfather when she decides to fulfill her dream of going to school. The closing film will be Playmobil: The Movie, the much-anticipated animated feature film that was inspired by the success of the Lego films. Most of the films will be dubbed into Hebrew and have Hebrew subtitles. Workshops on the art of moviemaking will be held in the Cinematheque lobby and there will also be master classes, performances for children, a Virtual Reality workshop and much more. There will be both an Israeli Competition, with the best of recent Israeli films for children and some classics, and an International Competition, with films from all around the world. Among the films shown in it will be The Arctic Camels by Karl Emil Rikardsen, a documentary about a family living on an island in Norway, where the parents give the children camels when the kids ask for horses.The Falcons, which takes place in Iceland, looks at a boy who takes part in a soccer tournament and finds the competition makes him grow up faster than he imagined.Anbessa is a docu-drama that tells the story of a boy who lives in a mud hut with his mother in Addis Ababa in the shadow of new condominiums. To cope with the frustrations of his life, the boy fantasizes about becoming a fierce lion.Fight Girl is a drama from the Netherlands about a girl who deals with her parents’ divorce by competing in kick boxing.In the Panorama section, the Slovakian film, My Grandpa is an Alien tells the story of a girl who must join forces with an alien robot after her grandfather is kidnapped and taken to outer space, an acclaimed look at the conflict between emotions and logic.The 19th Animix Tel Aviv, the Israeli International Animation, Comics & Caricature Festival, will take place this year from July 30-August 3. It features both feature-length and short animated films from all over the world, as well as exhibits of comics, cartoons and caricatures, workshops and all kinds of special events for the entire family.Among the international guests this year will be Tal Schwarzman, part of the Pixar animation team, who has worked on such beloved films as Inside Out, Coco and Finding Dory, as well as some celebrated films from other studios; Eyal Resh, who is on the animation team of the new documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth; British-Canadian animator Luc Chamberland, whose credits include the classic Space Jam; and Laurie Gordon, director of the Montreal International Animation Film Festival.An achievement prize will go to Israeli cartoonist Shai Cherka, who, as a religiously observant cartoonist, is a trailblazer in the art world, drawing comics about a loser named Baba and penning political cartoons for Makor Rishon.For more information on the Tel Aviv Children’s Film Festival, go to https://www.cinema.co.il and for Animix, go to http://www.animixfest.co.il/en/
