Little Histories of Cinema. The rules of the game

Children's film series

Over four sessions, The Rules of the Game explores the world of children from the perspective of play, fun, games and the learning of its rules as a way of perceiving reality and becoming part of it. The program aims to awaken and revive the joy of children and adults in perceiving the world and their pleasure in images that offer a different reading of everyday life.

From avant-garde cinema to video art classics, the program offers a broad visual overview that also encompasses recent works, and creates a dialogue between different genres and formats, classics and contemporary films. The films in the program don't just feature children, but also portray the filmmaker's reflections on motherhood/fatherhood and their own childhoods, or use play as an artistic strategy and an approach to life.

The first session, So What Do You See? offers a critical and poetic look at school years, the time when knowledge is accumulated and social and ethical values are internalised, with films that reflect on the formation of visual and cinematic sensibility. This is followed by Games Zone, something of a metaphor for recess at school, which interrupts classes and offers a different level of relating to the world: the time when other worlds are created and rules are turned upside down. The ludic nature of the world refers to this way of discovering one's surroundings and learning about them, either humorously or through contemplation. The third and fourth sessions focus on family and personal life, on the relationship between parents and children and the importance of the transmission of values, emotions and models of behaviour. Fathers, mothers, action! reflects on the parameters of freedom and protection that define parent-child relationships through films in which artists use their own children and family lives in their creative work, and show how it is influenced by their vision of and through the eyes of their children. This is also the focus of Pirates in the Kitchen, Marbles in the Hallway, the final session dedicated to Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner. In his films, Ben-Ner recreates classics from literature (Moby Dick) and film (L'enfant sauvage, Truffaut) in the family home using everyday objects, connecting the artist and his two children through a mix of education, learning, play and art.

Program by Maria Morata
Consultant: Carolina López Caballero