“Good cinema isn’t just good to watch, but also necessary to be watched.”
Today, the power to change the world lies with the youth for the future is theirs. But this power can only be realized when it manifests and cultivates itself in a meaningful way. Every single positive action can offset a chain reaction of acts of goodness and kindness. Our effort is to inspire these young minds to become these very points of positive actions in the society, and offset multiple chain reactions.
However, children today are riddled with different challenges every single day. Ranging from bullying, to depression, to body image issues and even low self-esteem concerns, with a different era, a different set of struggles have cropped up. These issues have become alarming, and need to be addressed in a fashion that these students would be able to understand, and learn from. We need to keep developing innovative ways to mould and transform the young minds.
In order to then productively address the problems millennials face, we worked on a unique initiative using the medium of the visual arts. The result of this brainstorming was the ideation of a film festival meant for children and youth. Now moving towards the third edition, Smile International Film Festival For Children and Youth (SIFFCY) brings together good and meaningful world cinema. SIFFCY not only allows us to sensitise the young minds, but also keeps the medium of sensitisation fun, creative, and unique. As we celebrate SIFFCY for the third consecutive year, we have more than twenty thousand students from schools across India joining us in our endeavour, and they are ready to be inspired, and to inspire.
The power of cinema today is such that it can leave an everlasting impact on a mind, and given that students tend to get highly influenced by what they see, it becomes important to keep this visual content relevant and responsible. Even while there is a lot of good cinema out there, it often becomes tedious to have access to that content, which is why at SIFFCY, we are screening 100+ movies from around the globe, at no cost to the children, to motivate them-so that they have the ingredients, to become our future leaders and more importantly, responsible citizens of our nation.
SIFFCY (Smile International Film Festival for Children and Youth) is a week long festival, to be held at Siri Fort Auditorium, New Delhi from 11th-17th December, 2017. The festival will attract school going children, budding filmmakers, Industry professionals, and audience members from around the world. More than 100 movies from around the world will be screened here, including feature films, short films, and documentaries. Some of the key highlights would be events such as Film Making Workshop, Cinematography Workshop, Storytelling Workshop, Photography Workshop, and much more. There is no registration fee, however, we would encourage pre-registration on our website. For more details, please visit us on siffcy.org
