DAFilms for Children

A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Amsterdam Zoo, Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered between man and animal.

There are places that we don’t want to know anything about, places that we would rather pretend don’t exist at all. One such place is a dumpsite. From the humans’ point of view, it is a ghastly place, a stinking desert of trash. But it’s a desert that is teaming with life. The astounding profusion of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, all intertwined in an existential life-death relationship imparts to it with some strangely alluring dream-like quality.

Short film about “murmurations”: the mysterious flights of the Common Starling. It is still unknown how the thousands of birds are able to fly in such dense swarms without colliding. Every night the starlings gather at dusk to perform their stunning air show...

Svyato opens with a quotation from an old legend: “But then everything changed on the day that man first saw his own reflection.” In Russian, “svyato” means both “happy, clear and joyful” as well as “considered holy.” But Svyato is also the short form of Svyatoslav and the nickname of Victor Kossakovsky’s son...

This is the story of a sixty day long walk in Cape Verde. No mobile phone, no watch, no plans for what to do next – only the bare essentials in the backpack. Out traveller explores the mountains, the villages, the sea, a talking tortoise, the goats, the music, the dry haze, the people of Cape Verde and an essential part of himself.

A big cinema documentary about water being for Dutch people both a place of work and pleasure, and a source of threat and misery.

Are plants intelligent? What if they also have sensations and memory, can think and communicate? Some of them sleep and dance. Scientific facts unfold fresh ideas about the world of vegetation. Do plants resemble us? Do we underestimate them? Scientists are asking these very questions, do they perceive their environment? Do they have a memory? Could they have a nervous system? To these men and women, the great divide between the plant and animal world is not that great at all.

Esperança, 15, has just arrived in France from Angola with her mother. At Amiens station, they don't know where to sleep and look for someone who can help them. Esperança tells us her story in an animated documentary.

A journey of a 7 year-old boy's acceptance of his grandpa's death in a traditional Taiwanese funeral.

Hot summer has come to their tiny village in the Cuban countryside, Leonel and Antuán intimately explore their universe far from adults. With a considerable difference in age, their unique friendship is torn between games and fights, conversations about everyday life, existentialist questions, simple pleasures, and boredom.

Miroslav Janek observes life in a children’s home through games. He chooses the children like partners for filming, teaches them to handle the camera, and leaves them to film their environment themselves...

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s Do Donkeys Act, filmed over 5 years, subtly subverts the notion of the ‘dumb beast’ as it captures donkeys communicating emotionally with each other in the midst of healing from human cruelty and neglect...

Brilliant american detective Nick Carter and czech Commissar Ledvina investigate a baron who has cultivated Adele: a huge flesh-eating, Mozart-loving plant.

A documentary on the every day life of Grant Sabin, young talent of the American Blues.

A documentary about Karel Zeman, a magician of the big screen. Without digital effects he brought audiences around the world back to prehistory, forward to the Moon and deep under the Sea.