PSAROLOCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
FOR CHILDREN & YOUNG PEOPLE
A festival aimed at younger viewers, with their curiosity and spirit of discovery at the core.
Photo : THE DRIFTING GUITAR Animation by Sophie Roze I France
29 and 30 March 2025
Empathy, the key to connection.
Lilliputian cinephiles make an appointment with their parents for free quality cinema at the PSAROLOCO International Film Festival for Children & Young People on March 29 and 30 at the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation
Psaroloco festival fulfills the educational objectives of the Psaroloco Media Literacy program which is accompanied by free access to educational and entertaining material for the educational use of films as well as parallel activities.
Welcome !!
Everything you need to know about this year's film programme, side events and film ambassadors can be found below. If you have any questions or can’t find the information you need, you can always email us at psaroloco.project@gmail.com
Now onto the good stuff :
Workshops
Film Ambassadors
Panels
Highlights
They're kind of a big deal.
THE DRIFTING GUITAR
An old-fashioned cartoon and an ode to mutual aid animated puppets, beautiful cardboard or
cut-out fabric sets.
Winned with a Crystal at the Annecy Festival in 2024 (in the TV production category), Sophie Roze’s film is worth seeing for its stop-motion animation. On one side, a marten, a traveling tie saleswoman, meets a music-loving hedgehog in the forest. On the other, a capybara (a large South American rodent) accordion player is looking for a coati (a small mammal related to raccoons) guitarist, his partner, to play milonga tunes… In addition to the moral of the story – music as a universal language – the fluidity of Sophie Roze’s staging gives the film its charm, alternating narrative regimes (the heroine’s dreams, the theater scene)
LOLA AND THE
SOUND PIANO
“Lola and the Sound Piano” is a brilliant tale about the power of love, defeating difficulties and barriers – the social ones, too. Lola is a teenager learning to play trumpet and she is sometimes overwhelmed by her younger brother’s behaviour. When a child psychiatrist explains to her what the autism spectrum is, Lola decides to gain his attention and find a way to communicate with him.
– We desire to create a project that will make young viewers reflect on the people around them in a poetic and metaphorical way. Indifference and even rejection and misunderstanding that people on the autism spectrum can suffer is an excuse for a conversation about inclusion and living in our common world. We tell the story of siblings that want to find a way to mutual understanding – movie’s director Augusto Zanovello explains, and emphasises that in wider context the film talks about overall difficulties that we as people have while communicating with each other.
THE BUS
In the 1990s, eight-year-old Agata leaves her Polish homeland to take a bus to Belgium by herself. Anxious about the journey, she begins to write a letter to her father who has stayed behind in Poland. When she drops her pencil and it rolls away, Agata is forced to overcome her shyness. Searching for it, she weaves her way between the rows of seats and plunges into a fantastical world inhabited by strange half-human, half-animal passengers. Agata’s perceptions transform the reality of migration into an imaginative experience of initiation.
World premiere, Generation Kplus Berlinale 2025