childhood
James Saynor
The French military outpost on Madagascar is a “family cocoon, full of love and benevolence”, according to a character in this fictional portrait of the country in the early 1970s. Of course, as soon as we hear this claim near the start of Red Island, we assume we’re about to witness anything but.What follows, however, is less a broadside against French colonialism, or even against the nuclear family, than a largely personal exercise in nostalgia. Sixty years on from The Battle of Algiers, a film that exposed the horrors of France’s imperial adventures to the world, Robin Campillo’s new movie Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
James Saynor
Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is. She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out. This is because Aitor, amid an extended family in the Basque country, wants to go by the name of Cocó – no, make that Lucía, she later decides. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Brighton Festival has a knack for choosing children’s theatre that is in equal measure as magical and captivating as it is simple and easy to understand. It’s an equation that means both adults and children alike can be sure to have an experience that promotes creative imagination, stimulating conversation and calm reflection.Dan Colley’s retelling of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s tale A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings consists of two storytellers, a kitchen table and a cast of tiny figurines in front of a cardboard set. The pair inform us that “we tell the story because we like it” and issue a Read more ...
Izzy Smith
Max Porter continues his fascination with the struggles of youth in his newest release, Shy: his most beautifully-wrought writing to date, an ode to boyhood and a sensitive deconstruction of rage, its confused beginnings, its volatile results, and all the messy thoughts in between.We follow the eponymous Shy, a teen of the 90s, whose Walkman-played drum-and-bass is his only solace from the relentless pressures of everyday life. The lyrics of DJ Randall, Congo Natty and the likes are scattered amongst foggy memories of his childhood, troubled dreams of the girl “who mutters in the walls Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Judging by the average age of people in the audience, many of those who enjoyed Dick & Dom in da Bungalow when it aired on the BBC in the early Noughties were already adults. There was, though, a smattering of youngsters near their bedtime – good to see, as one of the most enjoyable elements of the weekend morning BBC children’s show, presented by Richard (Dick) McCourt and Dominic (Dom) Wood, was its anarchic attitude to rules.Whether a generation of schoolteachers would feel so fondly towards McCourt and Wood is another matter. They were plagued by their charges playing Bogies, a game Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When I first started going to music festivals in the late 80s and early 90s, they were all wild celebrations of bacchanalian excess. Children were nowhere to be seen and there was always a crustie on hand, openly plying a wide array of brain spanglers, if that was what you wanted.These days, however, kids’ entertainment is viewed as an essential part of any such knees up – and even Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival has a kids’ gig and activities each year. Top of the family-friendly music festivals, without doubt, is Camp Bestival and this year saw Rob Da Bank’s musical empire expand beyond Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972).It was his emotional investment which made generations unquestioningly sympathise with the film’s privileged family fallen on hard times – a standby of middle-class children’s literature revived as recently as Mary Poppins Returns.That belated sequel proved you can better a beloved original, and poured Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground as a sensitive child.The cold blue colour grading, atmospheric sound design, and choice of camera perspective – always from the height of a child – immerses the audience from the very first moment in Nora’s experiences. No score distracts from the cacophony of the playground, the overwhelming echo and crash of the swimming pool. Quasi- Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The title is so long that the Royal Court’s neon red lettering only renders the first three words, followed by a telling ellipsis. But lyrical new play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy lives up to its weighty name.Writer-director Ryan Calais Cameron shows us Black masculinity in all its nuances and contradictions, presented by six actors so naturally charming it’s impossible not to fall in love with them. This is an odyssey through Black masculinity, a complex navigation of a sea of troubles and expectations and joy and love. Line by line, each man’s soul Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous, Rockwell suspects, of his close friendship with Quentin Tarantino. The intervening years haven’t been fallow, but Rockwell’s 10th feature, the lyrical childhood mini-odyssey Sweet Thing (2020), represents a major comeback.Rockwell's revival began with 2013’s hour-long Little Feet, made for $11,000 and starring his kids Lana (b. 2003) and Nico Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.That short story was developed into an award-winning novel; Joel Horwood’s adaptation opened at the Dorfman Theatre in late 2019, and was meant to transfer to the West End in early 2020. Now it’s back, and the spellbinding beauty of Katy Rudd’ Read more ...