Films Put the Accent on Reality

Belma crossed a minefield and dodged snipers’ artillery in her flight from Bosnia’s battlegrounds. But the war intruded on her Danish refuge, and the teenager watched in anguish as her father was arrested for the brutal beating of an accused war criminal.

Emina left her Bosnian village to study in Sarajevo and was unable to join her family when they fled to Denmark after her father was released by Bosnian Serb captors. It was years before they were reunited.

One is a movie. One is real life.

The two stories were joined in the Danish film “Belma,” typical of the offerings at the 19th Berlin children’s film festival that defy the happy fantasy world of so many Hollywood movies for children.

“Belma” stars Emina Isovic, a Bosnian teenager who was living in refugee housing when she was cast for the role, and the film is as much the story of a war refugee as it is a tale of first romance, said director Lars Hesselholdt.

“It’s hard to say which is the meat and which is the potatoes. You could say the coming-of-age story is a vehicle for the other story,” he said.

Like “Belma,” many of the movies shown at the recent festival did not take place in mythical lands where children call on powerful beasts or supernatural forces to aid them.

In the Dutch film “The Boy Who Stopped Talking,” Mohammed and his family leave their eastern Turkish village during the Gulf War for the safety of Holland. Homesick, Mohammed refuses to talk.

In the French-Spanish production “Master of the Elephants,” Martin goes to live with his father in Africa after his mother’s death. He’s not only the new kid but the only white one in the school.

Although the films realistically portray events more often seen on the evening news, they also contain universal themes of children’s movies: first love, loyal friends, the loneliness of being new.

“It doesn’t matter if you live in a part of the world that is war-torn or a part of the world that is economically depressed. I think the value is that kids see themselves up there on the screen,” said Jane Schoettle, a jury member and the director of children’s film festivals in Toronto and Saskatoon, Canada.

Despite the strong showing of foreign films in this year’s Academy Award race, festival participants acknowledge that few of the 14 feature films shown in Berlin are likely to play in U.S. theaters.

“You can show all kinds of adult foreign films, but children’s films are the last bastion,” Schoettle said.

Festival entry “Kids of the Roundtable,” a Canadian production, has shown on the Disney Channel. “The White Balloon,” recommended by the Berlin festival organizers for children over 6, played in adult festivals in New York, Toronto, Telluride, Montreal and Cannes, where it was honored as best directorial debut.

The Berlin festival winner, “My Friend Joe,” a British-Irish-German movie starring Sissy Spacek’s daughter, Schuyler Fisk, is perhaps the best candidate for wide U.S. release, Schoettle said.

But the difficult themes presented in some of the other movies give them less commercial potential in the American market, festival participants said.

“The American people are more than happy to watch ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ and ‘Babe.’ But the children in my country won’t get the chance to see ‘Belma,’ ” acknowledged American filmmaker Robert Tinnell, who directed “Kids of the Roundtable.”

Language is an obstacle, particularly in films for children, but even greater is the drawing power of big studio productions, Schoettle said.

“Who’s going to bring ‘Bread and Poetry’ from Iran when they can book ‘Pocahontas’?” she asked. “I would love to bring a lot of these films to North America, but realistically there is very little hope of getting a theatrical release.”

The more realistic avenue is to push for video release in addition to festival showings, she said.

“My Friend Joe” director Chris Bould takes encouragement from the success of “Blue Sky,” for which Jessica Lange won the 1995 best actress Oscar even though the film was shelved when Orion Pictures went into bankruptcy and has not gone into wide theatrical release.

Grown-up distributors may shy away from the realistic stories presented in some of the festival entries, but Bould said the films have a universal quality lacking in many adult films.

“It has nothing to do with adult films. It’s not about ‘Seven’ or ‘Heat’ or ‘Casino.’ All of the people in the world are not gangsters, prostitutes or hit men. But we were all children.”