From page to screen, 90-Second Newbery Film Fest fires up kids’ imaginations
Ever seen “Charlotte’s Web” as a 90-second horror piece? How about “Holes” as a musical? These are the types of creative adaptations screened at the 90Second Newbery, a traveling film festival showcasing student short films inspired by Newbery-awarded books. The fest, founded by author James Kennedy (“The Order of Odd-Fish”) in 2011, has a few guidelines — among them, films must be primarily made by kids 18 or younger and (loosely) based around a Newbery winner or honoree.
Kennedy, who has been bringing the festival to Boston since 2017, praised the city’s deep connection to children’s literature, from the many authors with ties to the area — M.T. Anderson (“Feed”), for example, and Rebecca Mahoney (“The Valley and the Flood”), this year’s cohost of the 90-Second Newbery — to the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture. He features a mix of “winning” films that are screened in eight cities around the United States as well as local picks of festival entries. He said there’s something for everyone, from the general public to the elementary school kids who often star in the films.
“Even if you don’t have a movie in the film festival this year, I think this is very interesting for people who just like weird movies,” he said. “Kids make things that are unintentionally much stranger than an adult could make; there is a kind of a beautiful naivete to them.”
The “90-second” aspect is not a hard limit; Kennedy just asks that submissions are kept brief. He understands it can be challenging to distill a rich, imaginative work of literature into approximately a minute and a half but noted that process is a sneaky way to get kids to connect more deeply with what they’re reading.
“It causes the kids to have to really figure out what the book is about,” he said. “You have to make choices, just as a Hollywood film adaptation has to.”
The idea for the festival struck Kennedy in 2010 while thinking about “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeline L’Engle — he wondered if he could distill the book’s plot into a 90-second film. After writing a script, he shot the film with his niece, nephew, and their friends, uploading the video online in January 2011.
The short is featured on the 90-Second Newbery website as an example, though Kennedy encourages people to get far more wild with their source material than he did. His favorite submissions are the ones that are most creative and original.
“When you take it in your own direction while still keeping some fidelity to the source material, it allows you to kind of make it your own,” he said.
The point of the festival is not to create competition; it’s all about encouraging kids to stretch themselves, take on ambitious projects, and dive deep into classic literature.
“If you keep encouraging them over time, they enter the film festival year after year, and you see how their skills grow,” he said. “It’s really cool to see how their movies change and how their sensibility changes.”