What "World Focus" Programming Is Really For

Most festival sections exist to rank films against each other. World Focus deliberately doesn't. Each year we spotlight one country's children's cinema — its industry, its history, the films that shaped how that country tells stories to its own kids — without turning it into a contest.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. Competition sections optimize for films that stand out in a single sitting; a cultural spotlight can instead show range across decades — an early landmark alongside something recent, a documentary next to an animated feature — because the point isn't picking a winner, it's giving an audience context they wouldn't otherwise get.

World Focus 2027 looks at Iran, a country with a genuinely singular history in this space: a state-supported children's film institute that, starting in the 1960s, trained some of the most influential directors in world cinema by holding them to one simple standard — make something a child would actually want to watch.