After the recent announcement of its series of events in Lahore and Karachi, The Little Art successfully completes phase 1 of its activities with the 4^th ArtBeat– National Child Art Competition and Exhibition 2015 in Lahore [from 30^th September – 3^rd October 2015] and in Karachi [from 9^th –10^th October 2015]. With the ArtBeat in Karachi, team TLA also completed the International Children’s Film Festival (KICFF) 2015 in collaboration with Teachers’ Resource Centre (TRC) in Karachi from 5^th– 10^th October 2015.

With “Kaisa Pakistan” as the theme of the competition, the 4^th ArtBeat received over 6,000 artworks from 210 schools and nearly 25 community organizations from across Pakistan, making it the largest participation of children the competition has ever seen. Some of schools that were chosen for prizes and exhibits included: Special Education and Training Center, Bostaan’ Ilm School, Rising Stars Girls Elementary School, Bloomfield Hall School, Roots International School, Army Public School, Faisalabad Grammar School, Karachi Cambridge School, Happy Home High School, SLS Montessori & High School, Roots School System and the Bacha Khan Foundation schools from Malakand and Khyber Agency.

The selected winners from the ArtBeat competition were awarded cash prizes worth Rs. 300,000 and certificates at the opening events in Lahore and Karachi. As part of the festival The Little Art also announced its national film making competition “Once Upon a Film” inviting young local film makers to send in their short films and to showcase themselves at the Lahore/Karachi International Children’s Film Festival.

This year’s International Children’s Film Festival (ICFF) in Karachi and Lahore will showcase selected 56 films for KICFF from 24 Countries, including several films by young Pakistani film makers with the theme “Future Generation Cinema”. These films have been selected from a total of 960 film entries from 87 countries. This was an unexpectedly huge response to the submission call The Little Art made for international film entries in March 2015. The festival Jury this year that selected top international entries for this year’s festival consisted of known playwright and critic Mr. Asghar Nadeem Syed, Head of Film & TV, NCA, Mr. Majid Saeed, Director and Owner KINO films, Ms. Tazeen Bari, Independent Film maker, Fazal Ahmad and known Independent Researcher at Film Museum Society, Ms. Wajiha Raza Rizvi. The film programming has been carefully curated keeping in mind the young audience largely comprised of school children from different backgrounds. The recently Karachi ICFF ran in both the morning and evening slots from the 5th to 10^th October 2015 at both, the Ocean Mall II Talwar and City Auditorium and FB Area venues of Cinepax in Karachi.

Director of The Little Art, Shoaib Iqbal said:

“Since the inception of The Little Art, one of our main ambitions has been to establish the film festival as a platform for understanding global cultures and celebrating creative expression of our youth through the rich medium of films. Since 2010, KICFF has been successful in achieving this goal by reaching out to over 45,000 children in schools and communities with the best of children’s cinema from the entire world. We at The Little Art envision to keep providing exposure to young people in the region so they are able to develop their imaginations and engage in intellectual and social development; while also creating memorable experiences through the festival. After all, creative learning experiences and memories are what truly shape any human being”

All shows were very well received by the audience and witness 100 % booking throughout the festival events and after a demand from audiences, festival team decided to extend the dates. Although not part of the original plan, KICFF is now running shows till 14th of Oct at Ocean Mall, Karachi.

Going forward TLA prepares for International Children’s Film Festival (KICFF) 2015 in Lahore.

ArtBeat is a project of The Little Art which was initiated in 2012 with a vision to promote visual culture, develop understanding of issues among children and youth from their own perspective, and celebrate children as artists and present children’s view to community.

The Little Art is a non –profit organization working for promoting arts education and providing creative learning opportunities to children and young people in Pakistan. www.thelittleart.org