Holiday entertainment: The KidsFFest, from July 17 – July 26, will screen a range of child- and teen-friendly film, including the Indonesian hit Laskar Pelangi (Rainbow Warriors).

It's the time of year again when kids are off school, enjoying their break, and to keep them entertained, they have a film festival all of their own.

Most parents know how difficult it can be to find movies for their children to watch, with barely a handful of movies playing during the school holiday months of June and July suitable for them.

The Kids Film Festival 2009 offers a comprehensive program to fill the gap.

Opened earlier this week with the German movie The Three Robbers, the festival was motivated by concern over the lack of quality children's movies, Nia Dinata from Kalyana Shira Foundation said.

"There's not really much to see and the ones available are mostly animated Hollywood films," Nia said.

As part of the festival, running in Jakarta from July 17 through to July 26, children can choose from around 25 films in a range of genres, including animations, adventure stories, comedies, documentaries and short films.

And it's about more than passive watching: The festival also features workshops to help children get into the world of the silver screen.

Several workshops such as making a short film and subtitling took place earlier at the Cikal private school and the Salihara community.

To keep it international, festival organizers have worked with Unicef to choose six foreign movies - one each from Malaysia, Thailand, the Netherlands, France, Finland and Mexico - from which a selected jury consisting of children will choose a winner.

"It is about involving the kids to become more than just a passive audience," Nia said.

All viewers are invited to participate through the Kids Film Festival Audience Award by casting their votes for their favorite movie.

For Indonesian children used to watching only Hollywood movies, the rich array of choice this time will surely be refreshing.

The Iranian movie Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, for example, will introduce a far different setting to that found in most films as it narrates a child's take on the war in Afghanistan.

Not through violence - full of bloody scenes - but through a six-year-old girl's adventures in getting past a group of bullies playing their own Taliban war just to get to school.

Meanwhile, the Italian film Red Like the Sky offers the moving story of the childhood of sound editor Mirco Mencacci, who discovers an old tape recording and learns to record sounds to make his own fantasy stories.

The festival will also give movie goers a different experience in the form of outdoor cinema, with Minoes from the Netherlands screening at Erasmus Huis, two Japanese films at South Jakarta's Salihara theater and a surprise movie at a state elementary school in North Jakarta's Pademangan.

For a taste of local movies, as well as screen well-known titles such as Laskar Pelangi, the festival is adding a vintage movie from the 1980s by Imam Tantowi. Dubbed the local The Sound of Music, the screening of Tantowi's Nakalnya Anak-anak (The Naughty Children) will take the children of today to meet its now adult cast.

For more information about the festival, see www.kidsffest.org

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