International Children’s Film Festival Bangladesh is an annual film festival held countrywide, which showcases full-length features, shorts, experimental films made for and by children, including fiction animations and documentaries, from around the world. Founded in 2008, International Children’s Film Festival Bangladesh is the biggest children film festival in Bangladesh and also the only international film festival for children and young adults of the country. The festival will be held from 27 January - 02 February 2018 with an aim to screen nearly 150+ films created by renowned and aspiring directors from all over the world throughout the whole Bangladesh.
The festival is organized by Children’s Film Society Bangladesh (CFS) which is a youth-led organization working for children on the issue of film. Their aim is to create a positive impact on the entire film industry of Bangladesh by inspiring the next generation filmmakers. They were established in 2006 realizing the fact that the film, as the most powerful media of art of the present time was not being used for our children properly as a strong tool of learning and entertainment.
Strategic Partnership with the British Council
British Council Bangladesh has been supporting this festival, since inception in different capacity. Currently we have agreed to work on a strategic partnership with Children's Film Society Bangladesh to support expand their area of work to reach a more diverse audiences regularly. This is to support our arts work which focuses on three major themes: arts for social change, supporting the development of future arts leaders and building better understanding between young people in the UK and in Bangladesh.
As a part of this strategic partnership, we are going to support Children's Film Society Bangladesh with workshop by Mark Bishop from Natural Theatre Company UK on Zero Budget Film Making for the young film makers during the festival this year. Beside these workshops, we are screening films from the UK and other countries at the British Council as a part of the festival. We have also trained a group of young film makers using our Active Citizen module to help them develop social action projects in Rajshahi. We are going to screen the films from these projects. We have also jointly organised a series of film screening in six schools in Dhaka city as a part of promoting the festival.
We will continue supporting Children's Film Society to develop and manage film clubs at educational institutes and community groups regularly to engage Bangladeshi children beyond academic curriculum. As part of the contribution we are organising a workshop by a British film maker Pip Eldridge to develop the skills of film club coordinators from Children’s Film Society in March.
Film Screening Schedule