Phew! That's done then

It now looks as though in 2009, one way or another, the expansion of world cinema titles available for children in the UK, for which I've been campaigning for several years, may start to happen. I've got a stack of old files where the titles "great films for kids", "reel worlds" (a school in the Highlands got a magnum of champagne for thinking up that one), "film world" and "window on the world" have all had their little time in the sun and then got packed away, superseded by some other plan. The "Watch This!" project that I set up with the BFI and the Barbican was part of the same campaign, and last month I appeared at the NFT with Mark Cousins to help him pitch the argument for children being able to see stuff that's a bit more challenging than the latest Madagascar.

All these initiatives were aimed at the same goal: breaking down the UK's ingrained prejudices against the idea that children (that's people under 12) might be interested in films from other cultures and languages, and can if necessary read subtitles, just like Dutch or Danish children. I still believe that it's essential to find a way of importing films on a proper commercial basis, that from the outset they are available to families in local shops and rental outlets; and that the only way to do this is going to be some sort of subsidy to distributors.

However, there now seem to be other players in the field who may be able to make this happen (can't say who just yet, but things look promising). So it makes sense to pull the "Window on the World" page off my website (http://www.carybazalgette.net/) and to start up this blog. I've been meaning to do this for a while but every time I meddle with my website I have to re-learn Dreamweaver. Although this usually means re-discovering how easy it is, it's still something I keep putting off. But New Year's Day seemed like a good time to have a go. And phew! it worked.

One of the things I'll be doing is tracking progress on the "world cinema for kids" saga, but I'll also follow whatever other trails catch my interest.