SEMINCI Youth Section and Miniminci will encourage a critical view of the school community with a powerful programme featuring international premieres

The selection includes the Spanish premiere of Into the Wonderwoods, the new work by the co-director of Persepolis, and Last Swim, winner of the Berlin Festival Youth Prize.

The Miniminci and SEMINCI Youth sections, with which the Festival aims to encourage young spectators to become cinephiles and build the audiences of the future with a critical and restless outlook, offering the festival’s youngest audiences the premieres of numerous films that will be shown for the first time in Spain, including Into the Wonderwoods, the latest project by Vincent Paronnaud, co-director of Persepolis, and Last Swim, by Sasha Nathwani, winner of the Crystal Bear in the Generation 14plus section at the Berlin Film Festival.

The 69th SEMINCI will also be attended by a dozen directors, who will have the chance to chat with the students in the post-screening conversations. Last year, 22,655 students from Castilla y León attended the screenings: 13,337 students at Miniminci and 9,318 students at the SEMINCI Youth section.

Miniminci, the section aimed at elementary schools, will offer the national premieres of four animated feature films: Into de Wonderwoods, Giants of La Mancha, Elli and the Ghostly Ghost Train and Rebellious.

Alexis Ducord and Vincent Paronnaud – co-director with Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis – have directed Into de Wonderwoods (Angelo dans la forêt mystérieuse), a film adaptation of the comic strip by the latter – also known as Winshluss (a cartoonist) – starring Angelo, a 10-year-old boy, who is forcibly turned into a hero when his distracted parents forget him at a rest area, and he ventures into a mysterious world inhabited by strange and wonderful creatures. VERCINE distributes the film in Spain.

Giants of La Mancha (Gonzalo Gutiérrez, Argentina/Germany), distributed by Cinemaran, is an extraordinary and adventurous journey for the whole family, following 11-year-old Alfonso, heir to Don Quixote, and his three imaginary rabbits.

Elli and the Ghostly Ghost Train (Piet De Rycker and Jesper Møller, Germany) is a film distributed in Spain by Flins & Pinículas about how the desire to have a home is so strong that you can even find your family where you weren’t even looking for them.

Rebellious (Alex Tcit’cilin, UK), a modern take on the classic fairy tale, starring a young princess who defies her father breaking with tradition and choosing an intelligent and educated young man as her husband.

The Miniminci programme will be completed with Dalia and the Red Book, by David Bisbano; SuperKlaus, by Steve Majaury and Andrea Sebastiá; and Fox and Hare Save the Forest, by Mascha Halberstad, as well as two sessions of short films.

This section will also feature four exclusive premieres, such as Edge of Summer, by debutant Lucy Cohen, about a girl with an absent father who spends her holidays with her mother in Cornwall in the early 1990s; and the great sensation of the Generation 14plus section at the Berlin Festival: Last Swim. This film, winner of the Crystal Bear, is the promising debut of British filmmaker Sasha Nathwani, who will visit Valladolid to talk to the audiences about this story that follows a group of London students on the day they finish their final year of high school. Yoda Films is distributing the film in Spain.

The rest of the releases belong to the animation genre: Kensuke’s Kingdom, by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, which adapts the children’s book bearing the same name by Michael Morpurgo, an author also brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg in War Horse, about a boy who travels with his family around the world and gets stranded on an apparently deserted island; and The Glassworker, by Usman Riaz, the first hand-drawn animated film in the history of Pakistan – distributed in Spain by Selecta Visión – which delves into the life of a young glassblower.

SEMINCI Youth will also be showing Ghost Cat Anzu, by Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita, a Japanese anime that combines animation and rotoscoping premiered at the Cannes Filmmakers’ Fortnight about a 37-year-old cat that talks and lives like a human; and Savages, by Claude Barras (also author of My Life as a Zucchini, nominated for an Oscar and EFA Award in the category), a stop-motion animation film with a clear ecological message about a small orangutan who takes refuge in a plantation, fleeing from deforestation.

The audience will also be able to see films competing in other sections of the festival at the SEMINCI Youth Section. The Most Precious of Cargoes (Michel Hazanavicius) has been selected for the Official Selection. From Meeting Point, To Our Friends (Adrián Orr), Holy Cow (Louise Courvoisier) and Toxic (Saulė Bliuvaitė), winner of the Golden Leopard and Best First Film Award at the Swiss festival. SEMINCI Youth will also offer the European and world premieres, respectively, of the Time of History films Hija del volcán (Daughter of the Volcano) by Jenifer de la Rosa and Mi hermano Ali (My Brother Ali) by Paula Palacios. This programme will be completed with a session of five short films from the Official Section.

SEMINCI in the province

This year, the municipalities of Nava del Rey and Íscar will join the activities of the Education Department, in collaboration with the Valladolid Provincial Council. SEMINCI in the province will program this first year the feature films Ernest & Celestine, A Trip to Gibberitia, by Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger, and El universo de Óliver, by Alexis Morante, winner of the SEMINCI Youth Section in 2022, films that will have their own didactic material.SEMINCI’s educational programme also includes complementary activities designed to bring the festival to a wide audience with different interests, for example: the competition to choose the poster for the Miniminci section and the training programme Young Programmers – Moving Cinema, an activity carried out in partnership with the A Bao A Qu Association.