Once again, your best bets this weekend, cinema-wise, are to be found at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, and the Childish Film Festival within it in particular.
This weekend sees a pair of international features for kids and some awesome animated shorts. On Saturday, take the young ones to Flights of Fancy, wonderful shorts from around the world (11 am at the Oak Street Cinema). Later, older kids (pre-teens, still), will get a kick from the delightful Lepel (Spoon). Lepel is yet another manic Danish film, this time about a kid whose lost his parents when their hot air balloon spirits them away. And once again, like in Bonkers a week earlier, Lepel doesn’t shy away from some tetchy adult issues, like falling in love. You and your kid will have a blast! (Saturday at 2:30 at the Oak).
I didn’t get a chance to screen the South African film A Boy Called Twist, but I’m thrilled at the thought of catching it on Sunday. Again, this is ostensibly a kids’ flick. But Twist is billed as a “contemporary telling of Dickens’ Oliver Twist“, which, I have to say, is an awesome idea (and reflects Roman Polanski’s lack of imagination that he didn’t do it himself with his recent, dull-as-dirt adaptation). Set on the streets of Cape Town, with a young boy joining Fagin’s den of thieves and miscreants, Twist promises to be a wonder. Showing Sunday at 11am at the Oak Street Cinema.
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