Bag Of Rice

Bag Of Rice

(Iran, 1993. Director: Mohammad-Ali Talebi)

"This little girl is under-stimulated. She wants to know more about Tehran, where she lives. Her neighbour is an old lady who's half-blind but who has a ticket for a free sack of rice - but to get it she has to cross Tehran, which is twice the size of London. It's a planes, trains and automobiles adventure. The girl is way too young to be walking across six-lane highways but she's so desperate to push out beyond what she knows and the few alleyways in which she's grown up that she basically drags the old lady across the city. And things go wrong.

"I think this is the single best film about childhood because it's the richest and fullest account of the key human themes in children's cinema: liberty, attachment, straining at the leash, learning and loss. These themes recur again and again, and each of them is dealt with with such incredible richness here. I also admire films that achieve a lot with little means: this isn't an expensive film, yet I've seen people start to cry when they talk about it."

The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun

(Senegal, 1999. Director: Djibril Diop Mambety)

"This is a medium-length film, 45 minutes long, made by the great genre-bending African punk filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety - a crazy guy, an alcoholic, almost the Pier Paolo Pasolini of West Africa. He hated what was happening there, the way everyone wanted consumer goods, for instance. A very angry person. He only got to make two feature films and this is one of them.

"It sounds like a decent sort of film - a girl on crutches finds a way of taking control of her life - but nothing prepares you for the subtle poetics or the imagination with which he tells her story. Again and again he'll shoot a scene in an unusual way or have dialogue which is surprising.

"I often think of him as a sort of Wellesian character. He has a sense of the baroque. He'll choose a location which is extravagant and then provide a bit of human information within that which is completely unexpected. He is the filmmaker about which I am least articulate: I love his films, I've visited the village where he lived, I've been to his house and met people who knew him who go misty-eyed when they talk about him … but I just don't quite understand why he is so good!"

10 Minutes Older

(Latvia, 1978. Director: Herz Frank)

"It's a film 10 minutes in duration. The filmmaker was Latvian and he died in Israel last year. When you see it, you think 'Why has this not been done before?' It's just a child's face watching a puppet show, though it's exactly never clear what it is. I asked him once - I wrote to him and told him I loved his work and he sent me a little bag of stuff, which I still have. He said he wasn't clear either. But he's chosen a particularly good boy because he really expresses his emotion. Why this is kind of the bedrock of children's film, why all the others relate to it, is because children's emotions change so quickly and here you feel you're seeing a whole life lived in these 10 minutes. It's a real masterpiece.

"I showed it in the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1992 and a producer saw it and, as a result, he went and made two feature films, both called 10 Minutes Older, in tribute to it. It's the first time in movie history that a short film has led to two feature films. And Bernardo Bertolucci and Victor Erice [director of Spirit Of The Beehive] have also made films in tribute to this little Latvian film. It's an utter masterpiece. This is as great as the best films of Greta Garbo, and it's very similar in some ways."

Long Live The Republic

(Czechoslovakia, 1965. Director: Karel Kachyna)

"It's a widescreen film. Lots of films about children aren't because directors think their story has to have an intimacy and a human scale, but Kachyna goes for a massive, widescreen look. He worked with the same writer again and again, and the human content of this film, the reason it feels so honest and moving, is because of that writer, Jan Prochazka. Kachyna himself came from a background in stills photography and that's why his films look so brilliant. He uses a lot of deep focus so the visual elements are outstanding. There's a real sense of space.

"What's great about this film is that sometimes people cast pretty children who look angelic, but there's nothing pretty about this boy. He's rough, he's always rolling in the mud and he has a particularly hard time in life. Because he looks odd he gets bullied a lot, but what's great about him is that but he always imagines himself out of these situations. Again and again, he escapes. In A Story Of Children And Film, for instance, I show a clip where he escapes down a river on an ice floe.

"What I love about this film more than any of the others is that it really shows how a child is always only ever half-understanding what's going on around them: World War Two is under way, there's a lot of intimations of coming sexuality, but he's not quite getting any of it. This film is a real classic."

Crows

(Poland, 1994. Director: Dorota Kedzierzawska)

"Kedzierzawska seems to deal a lot with either very young people or very old people. She misses out the bit in the middle. I saw this at the Berlin Film Festival one year, and I came out and I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't understand why. I think it was because it was so honest.

"This little girl is Crow. She's rather cocky, she's aggressive, she's annoying and she's bored, and that idea of the bored, under-stimulated child is a big thing in the movies. So she steals a toddler and it suddenly becomes Hitchcockian because this toddler is really not safe with Crow. She treats her slightly like a doll but also she wants to play-act at being a mother, and all sorts of things happen to them. They run away, they get on a boat, they fall into the water, they nearly drown. This girl is tempting disaster.

"It's a troubling film and it's magnificent film, and it's certainly not an adult's view of the world - you really feel you're seeing it through a child's eyes."

Moving

(Japan, 1993. Director: Shinji Sômai)

"What is so great about this film is that it starts out like social realism - it's about this little girl, Renko, whose parents are splitting up. It could almost be a Ken Loach movie. But then the camera starts to move and crane, and so does the film and so does the range of the story.

"In this scene Renko's standing in the water looking out to sea. And what does she see? She sees herself, playing with her mum and her dad and she shouts to them. It's quite late in the picture and she realises that her parents' separation can't be bridged. And she sees this beautiful boat coming with a Japanese dragon on it, but then it starts to burn and, as it does, she realises that this vision isn't a happy one. At the same time the music begins to build - it's like Sergio Leone's music for Once Upon A Time In The West.

"There was a retrospective of Sômai's work in Edinburgh two years ago and this is the film of his that's best known and which was the most widely distributed. Certainly by this stage in his career all his brilliance shone - his control of performance, his incredibly long takes, sometimes up to five minutes, his operatic quality, the musicality and the grandeur. It's very like a movie by Visconti."