The films were screened at Nandan II, Girish Mancha and Madhusudan Mancha to celebrate 40 years of Satyajit Ray’s famous film for children, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. An exhibition of photographs, posters, sketches and graphics from the film were exhibited at the Nandan II foyer during the festival. Tapan Bandopadhyay, founder-secretary, Shishu Kishore Akademi, who is a noted novelist and bureaucrat, is mainly credited for organising this festival. Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was the inaugural film followed by 15 films, mostly Indian. There was one animation film (Prince And The Crown Of Stone) while the rest were either in Hindi or in Bengali with two having been dubbed into Hindi.
Among the Bengali films were Raja Sen’s Damu (1996), which bagged the Best Children’s Film Award at the National Awards. It is about a little orphan named Damu whose sole dream is to ride on the back of an elephant to his adoptive parent Panchanan’s house to fulfill a reckless promise, he made to Runku, Panchanan’s granddaughter. Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is based on a famous fantasy tale created by Ray’s grandfather Upendra Kishore Roy Choudhury. It is a story that never gets dated and appeals to old and young alike as it takes adults back to a piece of a lost childhood filled with magic and fantasy. Ranu (2001) marked the debut of Shyamal Karmakar. Ranu argues the cause of the girl-child in a rural setting where modern ideas have not been able to reach out and touch the masses. Based on the backdrop of a fictitious village in the dry and arid Birbhum district in West Bengal, it tells the story of a once-affluent Brahmin family, now fallen on bad days and the daughter of the Brahmin, Ranu. Ranu is a beautiful girl who tops the district at the school final examinations. But her father, Ram Chatterjee, does not send her for higher education because he cannot afford to. Jagannath Chatterjee’s Gaja Ukiler Hatya Rahasya (2006) marks the centenary of the Jnanpeeth Award-winning Bengali littérateur the late Ashapoorna Devi on whose work for children the film is based. It is a rather funny film where fantasy, ghosts, twins and so on, where a stingy old man named Gajapati, believed to have been murdered, comes alive and hilarious consequences follow. The most interesting thing about this film is that there it does not have a single child character.
Gul Bahar Singh’s Goal (1999), though made in Hindi, was produced and mainly shot in West Bengal. With a deceptively simple narrative of a football match being played between two rival teams to gain the challenge trophy. Goal is a multi-layered film which has several strands of meaning interwoven into the main script. Though aimed at children as its audience, Goal is as much a film targeted at adults. It weaves in, with Gul Bahar’s gift for the subtle and the understated, the super-sized egos of small town sports clubs for whom the trophy is more important than the game. It shows how winning becomes a metaphor for the ego rather than a reward for excellence. Where a group of seemingly modern and snobbish adults are fettered to their rigid beliefs in caste and social background, and they don’t even know it. Goal offers one of the finest packages that blends entertainment with hope and also evolves into a scathing social statement against politics in sports even at the small-town level. Singh’s other film on sport, Sixer (1999) with Amrish Puri in a prominent role, was also in Hindi but shot in Kolkata. Sixer deals with the story of children living in two apartment blocks in Kolkata. They are two worlds divided by two separate blocks of a multi-storeyed apartment complex. Children in the two blocks between the ages of eight and 14 live happily together, go to school and indulge in pranks. Amrish Puri played a role where, in the beginning, he is an unfriendly sort and does not seem to like children, especially when he discovers that they have smashed his window pane while at play. But having been in the military himself, he soon gathers the children together and urges the other elders in the complex to encourage healthy competition among the children rather than allow them to indulge in competitive one-upmanship. Most of the Indian films screened were National Award winners and were produced by the Children’s Film Society of India.Among them were Santosh Sivan’s Abhayam (1991), which is about eight-year-old Vinu, who hates the idea of being trapped within a time frame and runs away from home to go to his grandfather’s village. Then there was Arun Khopkar’s Haathi Ka Andaa (2002), alongside Vinod Ganatra’s acclaimed Heda Hoda (2003) and Sunil Advani’s Ek Ajooba (2000).