The Kids Will Be Alright | June Monthly Top
We associate July with the summer holidays and Children's Day, this social construct that we use to celebrate and revisit the purest period of our existence before we have been perverted by adult responsibilities. Or, depending on the case, it can be the memory of the parades of the Falcons of the Fatherland (i.e. an organization for children from 4 to 7 years old in communist Romania) or of the '90s popular TV shows for children or of childhood games, which are all still fresh in mind. Most often, we speak condescendingly about “acting like children” as if the little ones' sense of self were inferior or incomplete, and we look back on that period by looking down at it, from the height of the adult gaze. Few films diverge from this simplistic perspective, trying not to adapt but to capture the curious gaze of the little ones and their way of seeing the world they are part of. I chose four films that build a cinematic universe around childhood by placing it at its center and not in the broader context of society. These films' protagonists are not defined by the adults they come from, rather they deepen what it's like to feel something new, to discover things for the first time, or to try to make sense of them.
Film critic and programmer, she collaborates with various international film festivals. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Indiewire, Film Comment, Vague Visages and Desistfilm. In Spanish she has written for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and in Romanian she collaborates with FILM magazine. Programmer and coordinator of Tenerife Shorts.
