Tomorrow marks the opening of the tenth annual New York International Children's Film Festival, which runs through March 16 and spreads its bounty across four venues: IFC Center, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theater, Symphony Space, and the Cantor Film Center. The festival was launched a decade ago by Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro, who immediately discovered that they faced an uphill battle from those who associate the term "children's film" with "inoffensive pap." It's a measure of just how ingrained that idea has become that the festival founders had to address it even in their discussions with filmmakers who were reluctant to have their films shown, lest they become tainted with the dread "family friendly" label. As Beckman told S. James Snyder in an interview for the New York Sun, "Over and over, I found myself talking to filmmakers who reacted along the lines of 'I'm not sure this is a movie for children.' And I just started to become this broken record: 'Don't judge it through the lens of whether this will be nice for children. If it's a great film, then it's a great film for all age groups.'"

Beckman and Shapiro hung in there, and by now, they've begun to reap the respect and rewards befitting their mission to provide young viewers with some movie excitement untainted by condescension, pandering, cheesiness, Slurpee cup tie-ins, and all the other general hatefulness that goes with the family "entertainment" mass-produced with the goal of teaching future consumers that it's never too early in life to start scaling your expectations downward. In the teeth of that machinery, the Children's Film Festival's mission statement — "to promote intelligent, passionate, provocative cinematic works for ages three to eighteen and to help define a more compelling film for kids" by presenting "a highly selective slate of the best animation, live action, documentary and experimental film from around the world" is clearly a heroic one. (The festival also includes filmmaker Q & As and workshops designed to light a fire under aspiring moviemakers. You can buy tickets, get more information, or watch a few films on-line at their website.) This year the schedule includes seventy-five features and shorts (carved out of a mountain of some 2500 entries) and a festival jury that includes Gus Van Sant, James Schamus, Susan Sarandon, and Adam Gopnik. As Beckman points out, the festival's awards selection helps to point up the need that the festival serves in the lives of budding young movie geeks, "As part of the audience award," he says, "we give ballots to both children and the adults, and in the early years, we started seeing this strange trend, that almost without fail parents would vote for the movie that seemed sweetest and nicest, and kids often chose the more challenging and interesting material. For us, it wasn't just interesting, it was educational. The parents picked the happy option, and the kids picked the films that respected them enough to go serious."