I’ve spent this week finishing up my first long cartoon—which basically means I’ve been scrambling like mad—in order to finish it by yesterday’s deadline for the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. To help others avoid the same sleepless fate I thought I’d put up some upcoming deadlines.
Besides Chicago we actually just passed quite a few by the beginning of this month—Animadrid, Auburn, Carousel, Cinekid—but the good news is that the Columbus International Film and Video Festival apparently had a glitch in its email system and thus postponed its final deadline from July 1 to July 15. That's Tuesday! This is a wide-ranging event featuring all kinds of productions for both adults and children, and it’s definitely worth looking into, fast.
August 1 is the deadline for Buster: The Copenhagen International Children’s Film Festival. Buster is a young but thriving event that has already established itself as the premiere children’s film fest in Scandinavia. The Danish-language website is here but you can find a bit more information in English here. Buster will be held this October 19 to 26.
The deadline for the twenty-sixth Ale Kino! International Young Audience Film Festival is August 15. Ale Kino is held in Poznan, Poland, this year from December 12 to 20. Eastern Europe has been a hotbed of cutting-edge children’s films for decades, so don’t disregard this one because of its location. The English pages on the website are quite complete.
Films for Les Nuits Magique are due on August 31. Also known as the Festival International du Film d’Animation, this fest, now in its eighteenth year, is part of a larger film festival in Bègles, a suburb of Bordeaux, which more or less puts you in the neighborhood of Cannes (!). It’s an animation festival and not strictly a children’s festival, but the two are often consonant and for those with cartoons it’s definitely worth checking out.
Without spending a few more hours doing research, the next festival I’m aware of is the Castellinaria International Youth Film Festival in Italy, with a deadline on October 1. But there are a lot more festivals than I’ve been able to investigate. I’m constantly trying to improve my permanent list of links to kids’ film fest websites, and this week I’ve added one to the film festival page of the International Center of Films for Children and Young People. This NGO serves as an umbrella organization to help sponsor dozens upon dozens of fests, including some I’ve mentioned already; it actually merits a post of its own some day. On the website you can search by name, geographically, or chronologically within an incredibly large list of events—hopefully one will be a perfect fit for your film.
1 comment:
As an update, I just learned that the early bird deadline for the San Francisco Bay Area International Children's Film Festival is August 31. That's a good one to aim for as well, right here in the States.
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