NEW YORK, NY – The critically acclaimed New York Int’l Children’s Film Festival will present six animated French films over the next two weekends, including a number of World, North American and US premieres. NYICFF, which kicked off on March 2 with the US premiere of the César Award winning Ernest & Celestine, is slated to show the following animated French films during the weekends of March 8 and March 15:

Approved for Adoption – North American Premiere, Belgium/France/Switzerland, Laurent Boileau/Jung Henin. In this fascinating animated autobiography a series of gorgeously animated, sepia-toned vignettes – some humorous and some poetic – trace filmmaker Jung Henin from the day he is adopted from Korea by a Belgian family, through elementary school, and into his teenage years, when his emerging sense of identity begins to create fissures at home and to inflame the latent biases of his adoptive parents. The filmmaker tells his story using his own animation intercut with snippets of super-8 family footage, archival film, and new footage. The result is an animated memoir like no other: clear-eyed and unflinching, humorous and wry, and above all, inspiring in the capacity of the human heart. In French with English subtitles - Recommended ages 11 to adult.

The Day of the Crows – East Coast Premiere, Canada/France, Jean-Christophe Dessaint. Raised like an animal since birth and knowing only the ways of the wild, a nameless boy has been forbidden by his father to venture beyond the edge of the forest that is their home. But when his father is injured, the boy goes to a nearby town for help – where he experiences the wonders of human contact and civilized living for the first time. With tips of the hat to the enchanted forest worlds of Hayao Miyazaki and François Truffaut’s The Wild Child, this lushly animated film travels the blurred lines between animal and human, nature and civilization, and the realms of the living and of spirits. In French with English subtitles - Recommended ages 7 to adult.

Ernest & Celestine – US Premiere, Belgium/France, Renner/Patar/Aubier. NYICFF kicked off the 2013 festival with the extraordinary new film from the producers of Kirikou and the Sorceress, Triplets of Belleville and The Secret of Kells. Due to popular demand after the Opening Night premiere, NYICFF has just added a screening of Ernest & Celestine, which joyfully leaps across genres and influences to capture the kinetic, limitless possibilities of animation. Deep below snowy, cobblestone streets and tucked away amongst winding tunnels, lives a civilization of hardworking mice, terrified of the bears who live above ground. Unlike her fellow mice, Celestine is an artist and a dreamer – and when she nearly ends up as breakfast for grumpy troubadour Ernest, the two form an unlikely bond and are soon living together as outcasts in a winter cottage. Like a gorgeous watercolor painting brought to life, a constantly shifting pastel color palette bursts and drips across the screen, while wonderful storytelling and brilliant comic timing draw up influences as varied as Buster Keaton, Bugs Bunny and the outlaw romanticism of Bonnie and Clyde. In French with English subtitles - Recommended ages 7 to adult.