Nina Landau’s My Family Is A Circus
Four films from Ket & Doc, the bold new programme for kids’ documentaries initiated by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) in 2018, have been chosen for the Kids DOK section at DOK Leipzig – a strong endorsement of the success of the venture.
Thank the Dutch. As Siebe Dumon, talent development exec at the VAF/Media Fund, explains, the scheme was inspired by Kids and Doc, a programme run for many years in the Netherlands and initiated by Dutch festivals IDFA and Cinekid.
“We adapted it [the programme] to our reality,” Dumon remembers. The first step was to find the right partners. Enter Flemish broadcaster Ketnet, which specialises in children’s fare, and JEF (an organisation/festival dealing with youth, film and new media).
The films are aimed at children between the ages of 9 and 12. They each last for 15 minutes.
So how do you unearth new documentary filmmakers ready to make films for the kids of Flanders? The answer, the organisers decided, was workshops to be held over two or three months. This is intended to give participants the skills to pitch their projects in front of producers. They then prepare an application for production support. A jury sits – and eventually chooses five titles from the ones in the workshop.
The initial batch covers all sorts of subjects. Among the titles screening in Leipzig is Tijs Torfs’ Bertha And The Wolfram, about a girl who loves to draw but is suffering from a disease that affects her sight. In Daphne van den Blink’s Dad Magnet, a young boy has to cope when his father goes away on a naval mission.
Fien, Jip & Fien by Marie De Hert and Ellen Pollard is a meditation on smart phones and young love while Nina Landau’s My Family Is A Circus follows a 10-year-old girl who works in a travelling circus. It’s a sad life on one level – she continually has to leave her school friends. On the other hand, it’s a joyful existence too, and she is a hard-working and resourceful heroine.
“First of all, they (the films) all talk to children and they have relevance in the society we live in today. That was very important,” Dumon reflects of a section which includes both “very heavy” subjects and more playful, light-hearted docs.
“The heavier subjects have some light,” Dumon adds, citing a film like Bertha And The Wolfram in which the girl with the eye condition is an inspiring figure rather than one of pity. Meanwhile, Dad Magnet is “about missing somebody you love,” a plight that almost all children will suffer at some time or other.
The filmmakers all come from a documentary background. Most are at the start of their careers and have only recently left film school.
Documentaries can often take a small eternity to complete. It’s one of the defining characteristics of the form that you don’t know in advance what will happen. You have to rely on real life. Nonetheless, the Ket & Doc directors were given a tight deadline. They had to start their films in June and deliver them by January.
They were also on strict budgets. Each film cost 40,000 Euros. “People with really ambitious plans that we didn’t think could be made for €40,000, they didn’t get selected to follow the workshops,” Dumon notes. “We were really looking at small films (made) not too far from home.”
The films have already screened in Belgium. They premiered at the JEF Festival in Antwerp. Audiences, mainly kids in the 9-12 age bracket, were “super enthusiastic” and wildly excited. The docs have also been broadcast on Ketnet.
Now, several new films are in the works. The second and third programmes of Ket & Doc have been commissioned. Five docs have been chosen from the latest workshop and should be ready in time for next year’s JEF festival. Meanwhile, eight projects have already been chosen for the third workshop which runs from December until February. Flemish kids, it seems, have not got the documentary bug and this is one programme they already cherish.
