Everyone’s talking about the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, and for good reason: once again, the good fellows down at Minnesota Film Arts have pulled a rabbit from their collective hats, working with few resources to provide one of the great festivals in the country. There’s a slew of intriguing films this year, but none more interesting to me than those at the Childish Film Festival.
Deb Girdwood and Isabelle Harder have been fighting their own good fight to include the children each year. As I’ve written before, this is an awesome gift to parents in the Twin Cities and especially their kids. We’ve got art programs, theater, music, but very little in the way of adequate alternative movie programming for children. Yes, you can find DVDs and tapes kids can watch, but really, the Childish Film Festival is a place for people–kids–to gather and share experiences. It’s a place to charge the imagination, in ways that surpass the usual garbage that kids get from their local Cineplex.
I’m especially pleased with Bonkers which shows this Saturday, April 21 at 2:30 at the St. Anthony Main. Frankly, I can’t imagine a better afternoon than this: a picnic lunch along the Mississippi, then Bonkers in the early afternoon, followed by a walk and a talk about what your offspring just encountered.
Bonkers is a wacky, kooky, sad, and ultimately profound story of Bonnie, a young girl struggling with her family life. Her mother, Lis, is, in Bonnie’s words, “bonkers”. Lis struggles with what appears to be manic-depression, one minute eating ice cream with Bonnie and then, suddenly, waltzing crazily with the handsome waiter who serves them. Other days, poor Lis lays in bed all day, barely able to speak.
This situation is tolerable because of a loving Grandma who takes care of these two misfits. But when she’s killed in a car accident, Bonnie is thrust into the role of caregiver to her mom, has to feed herself, and stay out of the orphanage. Along the way, Bonnie gets involved in a variety of crazy mishaps, including trying to get her mother to produce a new baby brother, befriending the crazy lady next door, and bringing home an elephant.
Bonkers is crazy-fun, full of the mania kids love, gross-out scenes and touching moments of love and friendship. But it also has that patient, understanding, and ultimately respectful approach to life’s problems that American children’s films avoid like the plague. The filmmakers seem to understand, as ours do not, that children possess brains, are acutely observant, and can often take care of themselves better than adults. I challenge anyone to find a movie from this country with a mother as sexually active as Lis (and she’s no slut–she’s a lonely single mom who wants a good relationship), or that takes a good look at serious mental illness with such aplomb (if anything, we’d overdo the pathos, if we would address it at all). If you want an afternoon of cinematic fun that’s well acted, directed, and thought-provoking to boot, Bonkers is not to be missed.
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