Screened for kids as well as for quality

This week’s first indie film festival for kids in Portland came about after Shawn Bowman, a film lover and mother, came to this realization: “I can’t watch any more Teletubbies.”

As director of Lil’ Longbaugh, the new children’s arm of Portland’s Longbaugh Film Festival (named after Harry Longbaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid), Bowman spends her days screening movies with her preschool-age children.

Intolerance for commercial pap is compelling parents like Bowman to seek, and in some cases organize screenings of, independent film options for their kids. These labors of love are born of desperation and disappointment: While major movie studios have pulled their weight of late with smart animated features, for every “The Incredibles,” with its two Oscars, there’s a largely undistinguished “Pooh’s Heffalump Movie” and, lest one grow overly optimistic, a truly dismal “SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2.”

There are large-scale counteractive measures out there. The New York International Children’s Film Festival, which began in 1997, screened 52 films in early March. And this fall, the 2005 Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, the largest in North America, will feature more than 200 live-action and animated films from 40 countries and is colloquially referred to as “the Cannes for kids.” But how many people can get their kids to Chicago? That figure is minuscule compared with the number of screens showing, say, popcorn fare like “The Pacifier” -- a hard reality that Bowman, a location scout and caterer, discovered when she and her husband moved from New York City to Northern California.

“We lived in Vallejo last year,” said Bowman. “There was one multiplex, and the movies were coming late, and it was the biggest feature, and they would blast the sound. We couldn’t go because my kids couldn’t do this.”

She sought succor from the local film society. When it suggested that Bowman could “rent from Netflix,” she offered to do the legwork necessary to secure some independents.

“I started looking for films, and I hit this gold mine,” she said: Hundreds of filmmakers were willing to let her show their works, and free. “Something comes out at Sundance and it’s going to hit 12 other festivals and everybody’s going to fight for the same 20 movies,” she said. “But with a kids’ market, these films are going to maybe two or three film festivals in the U.S.; they’re just waiting for an audience.”

The Vallejo International Children’s Film Festival screened at the local library and attracted the sorts of parents, said Bowman, “who watch IFC and read the New Yorker and who think, ‘I want my kids to see ‘The Red Balloon’!” When she moved to Portland last fall, she offered the films to the Longbaugh, a 3-year-old series sponsored by the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, which welcomed a children’s event.

“What we’re doing here isn’t necessarily of national importance; it’s a little festival,” said Bowman of Lil’ Longbaugh’s 30 short films and one full-length feature, all of which were screened Thursday. “But at the same time, what we’re doing is happening all over the country. There’s a culture demanding a certain level of film.”

“Polleke” is one such work. A frank, bruising and beautiful film from Holland, it tells the story of an 11-year-old Dutch girl in love with a Moroccan neighbor whose family disapproves of her; her father is a junkie and her mother a hysteric. It is not, said Bowman, the sort of film one can expect any time soon from an American studio.

“I think that in the U.S. we really try to shelter our children, and if we do see movies about kids in horrible circumstances, it’s always got this golden haze and this heavy orchestration and there’s this moment of triumph and victory,” she said. Polleke “has a lot of very big problems, and problems don’t have an age barrier; they come to us. Where it could be a really heavy film, it’s delightful.”

Bowman also chose two works from the British series “Open a Door,” which each year invites 26 filmmakers from 26 countries to make a five-minute film that begins with a child opening a door.

“My kids were watching [the film from Mongolia], and it starts with a little boy, and he’s got a stick, and he’s running around in front of his yurt with the stick, and my guys had just been playing horsy with their sticks, and they could see there’s really no difference between us and this kid,” she said. “That was the connection I needed for the entire festival. I’m not going to be able to get them to Mongolia, so for me, this is how I can share as much of the world as I can with them.”

“No Problem” was a favorite of Bowman’s kids, 4-year-old Xander and 2-year-old Lucy. “No problem! No problem!” they chanted as the animated short presented a series of conundrums (such as hot lava dripping off the moon) drawn and narrated by comic book artist John Bergin, predicaments deftly dispatched by Bergin’s 5-year-old daughter, Emma, whose sketched solutions -- involving birds, rope and/or additional suns -- had an ingenuity that was equal parts industrious and “well, duh.”

Watching Bowman’s children engage with the film was as engaging as the film itself: Lucy’s eyes grew gigantic when confronted with two of Bergin’s scary monster heads, then shrank exponentially as Emma saved the day.

This was viewing as a parallel experience, rather than a passive or patronizing one. Added bonus: Bowman showed no sign of the gag reflex known to occur when parents are repeatedly subjected to the saccharine strains of, say, Barney.

A bicoastal phenomenon

While helping to vet films for last year’s Brooklyn International Film Festival, Lisa King ran across what she called “many films that really weren’t for the adult audience but that we felt would be great for kids.” So she put together an off-the-cuff program of animated and live-action shorts.

“I had parents afterward that just said, ‘Thank you for having these types of films available for my children,’ ” King said, adding that her two daughters, ages 5 and 7, were the impetus for her to direct the First International KidsFilmFest, which premieres June 5 at the Brooklyn Museum.

“You look at the movies playing commercially and think, I’m not going to pay $12 -- which is what it is in New York these days -- for ‘SpongeBob,’ ” said King, whose day job is as a publicist for nonprofits. “On TV, for a half-hour? OK. Making a movie out of it? Please. There are so many more creative filmmakers out there making films that are so much more cutting-edge and that have such better lessons to teach us beyond SpongeBob.”

King is sorting through hundreds of submissions, looking for films with “an educational edge; something that’s teaching kids good morals, good values, something that engages them in the world around them, in their communities.” She asks the community to tell her what they want to see. After she, her children and some of her children’s friends (“I have my own little screening committee”) OK a film, it goes to an after-school program of second- through eighth-graders.

“I have 100-plus kids looking at the films and giving me their thumbs-up or thumbs-down,” said King, who this year will show about 30 selections, including several from New York animator Eva Saks, whose work was in last year’s festival and appears on “Sesame Street.” King’s goal is to “get the films out there, out there, out there.” To this end, the films will continue to circulate throughout the community, throughout the year, because of what she sees as a dearth of choices for children in the available media.

“There are 999 channels on DirecTV, and there’s nothing to watch. It’s crazy,” she said. “I wish they had a Nickelodeon independent channel. That’s my big dream.”