There were a lot of children in the fictions at the festival this year.  
I generally stay away from any kind of ranking or lists, but I will venture to say that Tori and Lokita by the Dardenne bothers of Belgium was the most important film at the festival. It was profound. It made me wonder the difference between the purpose of narratives that engage social and political problems and documentaries. 
Lokita, a young African woman and a boy, Tori are living in the margins of a Belgian city, selling marijuana for a chef who lets them take home focaccia. For some reason, and it may have been the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s mastery of the medium, I was frightened by their closeness, their affection which was keeping them human in their precarious situation in a hostile milieu. Very close bonds, deep attachments which are subject to destruction have been the subject of  Dhont’s Close and the documentary : Wildcat. Tori is able to win asylum in Belgium because his mother died in childbirth and so he is considered a sorcerer and subject to death or mistreatment in his home country. But Lokita has no such clear reason for asylum and is trying and failing to show that Tori is her brother. We watch her suffer the degradations of human trafficking: sexual abuse by her employer, harassment by the trafficker to whom she owes money, all intensified by the demands of her mother who needs what little she earns to send her siblings to school. While the Dardenne’s display the inhumanity of the white Belgian petty criminals who are exploiting the pair, they show no mercy to the Africans who treat her with similar cruelty. What really amazes me about the acting and direction here is that the filmmakers are able to show in a look, that particularly Lokita’s Belgian slavers, do not consider her to be human. It’s chilling, reverberating, searing. Aside from the power of the rest of the filmic elements, the plot is tight and complicated, each detail leading significantly to the bitter end.
I have seen so many excellent documentaries, as well as fiction films and books (German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s beautiful but unflinching Go Went Gone ) about immigrants in Europe. Perhaps the difference between documentaries and fiction is that fiction has a theme which we must pull on our own from the narrative. In this case we must consider the value of human life and confront the possibility that love cannot endure in a hostile, life-denying environment. The film is important because it holds up the mirror (As Aristotle used to say, with an admirable economy of space and time) to our world where we need to find a solution to these situations, this inhumanity. Michael Moore is fond of saying: “Cinema can change the world!” Returning to Sophocles et al. the theater was the place where the discussion was aired, the discussion that would ideally lead to solutions.
 
While affection and attachment may be doomed on the mean streets of a city in Belgium, the idyllic countryside and loving parents may not be able to protect a sensitive child from despair when he loses his best friend. Close (Lucas Dhont) is the extremely sad story of two boys who were very close but, when vaguely harassed by school mates for being faggots, Leo more or less abandons Remi. I won’t divulge the end although I will once again evoke Oedipus: you know what happens. Real cinephiles are’nt in it for the frisson. In any case, like Paul in Armageddon Time a young person, I think Leo here is twelve, must consider his moral responsibility, but of course, at twelve a child is still at the mercy of the fates and/or society. The film was long and lingered on the beauty of the flower farm where Leo lived, and the love and affection of his family. Leo joins the hockey team at school to prove his masculinity and it’s clear he has almost no ability. He is also slight. The subject of gender and physical training was also an important part of Dhont’s Girl (2018) about a boy who wants to be a ballerina. For some reason I think Americans, will think that Dhont’s Close will develop into a story about awakening sexuality. It’s not, its all about attachment, about the love that two children can have for one another before social conventions cause them, in this case, disastrously, to drift apart.
 
Another film with a child at its center was The Wonder. (dir. Sebastian Lelio) For some reason, I can’t appreciate most horror, but I love the gothic genre which is related.  I’ve read the classics like the Castle of Otranto and Charles Brockten Brown’s Wieland and traced the gothic in Hawthorne. I have followed the trails where Gothic and mystery merge and differentiate. From Poe’s the Fall of the House of Usher and Murders of the Rue Morgue, to Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn and on to Rebecca. So, I liked The Wonder. I liked the unfolding of the narrative in which an English nurse, who comes to hold a watch over a miraculous Irish child who has not eaten in 4 months and still seems perfectly healthy, realizes that the Wonder is more than a sort of trick; she slowly finds that the people in the isolated hamlet are religious fanatics, led on by a self-serving doctor—“perhaps she has learned to photosynthesize”—or deluded Priest all deeply wounded by The Hunger, the Irish famine, when people locked themselves in their houses to starve in solitude. A friend noted that the film was not “profound,” assuming we know what profound is. I will not give the story away, I felt it was very deftly constructed, and the rules I like about the genre held: death and the irrational were defeated by a crafty rational ruse and order was restored to the innocent narrator who had stumbled into the territory of the mad. There was, also a sort of contemporary, and understated connection between anorexia and abuse. The stock artifices of the gothic were well-employed: a spooky isolated location, a deathly pale and wasting child, an attic, a blazing fire at night on the moors which destroyed the imprisoning house, a bluish tint to everything.  Another standard feature of the Gothic genre is a frame story and director of The Wonder used a contemporary film set to provide a frame. My only criticism of the film was that the spooky, suspenseful sound design was perhaps slightly over done.

Another theme that was running through these films was that of human attachment. Tori and Lokita are keeping each other alive, in a hostile, exploitative environment.  Another film where the bond, this time between a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with severe PTSD and an Ocelot kitten, between animal and humans is healing. Wildcat is a documentary about people who rescue wild animals in the Amazon where they are in danger from hunters—the first rescue was killed by a trap with a gun—and then re-wild them. The ocelots are incredibly affectionate, and for anyone who is fond of the species, absolutely beautiful. (Trevor Beck Frost and Melissa Lesh) See this year’s Traverse City Journal for discussion of A Dog in Prison likewise about the healing power of the bond between humans and animals.