Niki Padidar's notes on youth programming

For this year’s IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary, we worked with programmer and filmmaker Niki Padidar, whose most recent film, All You See, opened IDFA 2022, and who has previously won the Youth Competition’s Best Film Award in 2015 with her film Ninnoc. With this collaboration, we set out to start a discussion that pushes the current conventions around the topic of youth documentary. 

To start off the debate, we asked Niki Padidar to publish a selection of notes to spark wider debate during the festival. We invite you to reflect and consider the topic with Niki Padidar’s insightful notes, and to participate in the debate with us during our Industry Talk: Pushing youth documentary & changing the game on November 15.

Notes by Niki Padidar

A father turns to his 10-year-old son: ‘I think it’s time we had a talk about sex.’ His son nods and says: ‘What would you like to know?’

Children are often underestimated. Parents hide condoms, thinking children won’t have sex. Grandparents hide illnesses, thinking children won’t get sad. Teachers block websites thinking children won’t find another way. And we as film professionals simplify reality thinking children otherwise won’t understand.

This simplifying of reality happens in different ways. All based on the assumption that children are stupid.

Some subjects, like death, abuse, or sexuality for instance, are often avoided for a young audience. But in real life, children see it, hear about it, and will experience it whether we hide it or not. Telling them porn is bad, forbidding and blocking it will not keep them from seeing it. Studies found that one third of Dutch children under 10 years of age has already watched porn. Denial will not change this. It will leave them vulnerable, with no tools to process what they see and experience. Can we help them to look critically at what they see, instead of trying to keep them from seeing it?

Films for youth have to be cheerful and end happily. When broadcasters seek films for youth, a usual requirement is for the film to be “optimistic, feel-good, with lots of room for lightness and downplaying of hardship.” . So, when you watch a youth documentary, you know that whatever disease, problem, or disaster lies ahead, will be solved within 15 minutes and everyone will end up cured, rescued, and unwrinkled. Young people deal with depression, chronic illness, fears, abuse, poverty, violence, and other uncertainties. Seeing these issues represented can help them feel relief, feel seen, help them empathize with others, and give them tools to cope.

A very popular way of simplifying reality is overexplaining. Making easy-to-digest youth content. First something will be announced. God forbid a child is taken by surprise. A narrator says: “Laura didn’t know her ice cream was about to fall.”

Then we see the actual thing happen. Laura walks, her ice cream falls. In some instances, also extra titles, arrows, and toddler like animations are used. One arrow pointing to the ice cream saying “ice cream” and one pointing to Laura, saying “Laura”.

Then we hear Laura’s own thoughts: “oh no my ice cream fell.” 

And finally, a recapitulation with someone else. “What happened Laura?” “My ice cream fell Tiffany.”

To make sure we get the simplifying right every time, we have standardized it all. Youth films should be made and judged according to one clear formula. 

1. Protagonist has a painful—but not too painful—problem, goal, or disease
2. Protagonist works on this painful—but not too painful—goal, problem or, disease
3. Protagonist encounters adversity but also happy advantages of this painful—but not too painful—problem, goal, or disease 
4. Protagonist solves this painful—but not too painful—problem, goal, or disease.

This forces filmmakers to invent or exaggerate a problem, force the problem to evolve, and impose a solution. Youth films become badly scripted reality. What about films that are experimental? Films that can be experienced with senses, other than with reason? Films with no clear beginning, ending, or conclusion? Films that are absurd or confusing? Films that leave you wondering what the hell it was that you just watched. Offering children more diversity would boost their creativity and help them discover that there are more ways of storytelling than just one.

One of the most damaging ways of simplifying reality in my opinion is by reducing people and issues to one clear and undisputed thing. Leaving out all the other (contradictory) layers. A transgender person in youth films is always busy transitioning. A Muslim is always dealing with religion. Why can’t we see a transgender person or a Muslim fighting climate change? Reducing people to one dimension reinforces prejudices and shapes our world in a harmful way. Children learn to box everyone in and never get to challenge their preconceived ideas or learn that reality is never this clear-cut.

To clarify things more, we tend to seek out differences, to magnify and reinforce them. At my first job, a news program for children, a director made a story about a Christian girl spending a day with a Muslim boy. The script was filled with lines like: “The girl drinks diet coke and the boy drinks traditional Arabic tea in Moroccan tea set.” I later found out that the director had never actually talked to these children. The script was based on her own preconceived notions and these children just served as actors for her scenario. We do this all the time. Going out to reaffirm our biases instead of dealing with the reality in front of us.

This need for anomalies results in treating children differently, depending on the country they live in. Children from the West are often portrayed showcasing talent, working towards a goal, overcoming their fears and struggles. In control of their circumstances. While children from other parts of the world—less developed in our eyes—are often portrayed as victims of their circumstances. Poor, being sold as a child bride, sad because of a war, etc.

These simple, happy formula films turn children into apathetic consumers—telling them what is going on, why, what they should think, and how they should feel. It is not our responsibility to dictate the truth and provide them with answers. Not to teach them what to think, but to show them that there are different ways of thinking.

When I lived in Tehran as a child, the city used to be bombed and we often sat in bomb shelters. My grandpa, after hearing the bomb alarm, used to first finish cooking my dinner and come to the shelter later carrying a chicken skewer. Because he knew I liked them. These kinds of details are surprising, confusing, conflicting, and will turn a cliché war image into a personal story and the two ‘victims’ into a child and her loving and somewhat crazy grandpa. 

Why do we smooth things over? Squeeze our protagonists to fit in our own narrative? Can we be more open to inconsistencies that don’t fit our ideas and scripts? It is such details that make protagonists more human, layered, surprising, and relatable.

Letting go of the safe formula means not knowing what the outcome will be. We should allow experiments and ‘failures’. I watched over 200 films for youth for IDFA this year and every time I saw a director take a risk it was a breath of fresh air. A film that takes risks and doesn’t fully ‘succeed’ is still more interesting than a safe film that looks like all the others. Failure can spur creativity and innovation and has great potential to help us grow. Wanting to be safe creates stagnation. The youth genre has to keep innovating and many innovations have been born out of total failure.

This year, I was excited to find out that IDFA had decided to challenge itself and their young audience even more. By allowing Dutch premieres, adult films, and more diversity in the type of filmmaking in the competition, they have put the films and filmmakers first and the rules second. I think this allows for a selection that showcases just how seriously you can take a young audience. These films are just as interesting for adults to watch as they are for children. It’s a mixture of what children want to see and what we would like them to see. We are confident that they will be amused, confused, and challenged. Confident that they can handle it. That they will love the films. Hate them. Criticize them. At least be activated out of their apathy. And help them to step outside the box; instead of falling asleep inside of it. They are capable of being interested in complicated stories. Just like normal human beings. Let’s trust on the fact that we are the stupid ones. Not them.

View the selected films in the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary here.

This article was published in IDFA 2023 Notes on a festival.