One of this year’s special events will be the post-screening forum Through Kids Eyes supported by RTÉ Young Peoples Programming. After the screening of 3 films, the makers of the films will discuss how adults can enter a child’s world, and how filmmakers working with children can capture their lives in an authentic way?

Three successful filmmakers will talk about their films and discuss different forms of documentary and the specific working methods they use when filming with children. Cúán Mac Conghail, (On the Block – Tory Island), Gabriel Noble (P-Star Rising) and Chloe Ruthven, (Mario and Nini) are the directors in attendance. Through Kids Eyes will be moderated by Sheila de Courcy, Commissioning Editor for Young Peoples' Programmes, RTÉ.

The three films of the attending filmmakers will be screened in succession on Sunday the 13th June in OStan Loch Altan, from 11 am and are followed by a one hour discussion.

On The Block – Tory Island by Cúán Mac Conghail

On The Block, an RTÉ/ BAI funded television project, is a unique chronicle of modern Ireland – modern history without prejudice, seen through the eyes of a hitherto silent community. Children between 8 and 12 years old are encouraged to take up their cameras and mics and make documentaries about their own lives without input or influence from adults. Four film clubs were set up around Ireland, including Club Scannánaíochta Oileán Thoraigh and this programme is the culmination of a year’s work.

Tory Island/ Oileán Thoraigh is a Gaeltacht island of the northern coast of Donegal, regularly isolated from the mainland by weather and tidal conditions. Half of the island is covered in bog, with the other half rising to precipitous cliffs. Ciara, Niamh, Lauren and Ríonnach, our intrepid film-makers, braved all kinds of weather to bring us a glimpse of what it is to live on an island. In Niamh’s own words “I read somewhere that the bigger the place, the lonelier it is.” These girls show us that life on Oileán Thoraigh is far from lonely. On the Block - Tory Island won the IFTA award for Children's/Youth Programme in 2010.

Cúán Mac Conghail worked as an editor with the B.B.C. in London from 1988 to 1995, where he worked on the series One Foot on the Grave and Bergerac, and the award-winning documentary Who Killed Martin Luther King amongst others. He returned to Ireland that same year where he has been working in film and television since. Together with his brother Fiach Mac Conghail he set up Brother Films which has produced six shorts, a series of visual art works with internationally renowned artist Dorothy Cross and the feature film Studs (2005). He has also edited and directed a number of IFTA nominated programmes for RTÉ and TG4, including The Snip, Only Fools Buy Horses and Tails From America. He also set up Macalla Teoranta where he has been producing programmes for TG4 and RTÉ for the last ten years. The documentary On the Block (2007) was nominated for the Peabody Award and has won five awards. As a result of its success R.T.É commissioned a series following four different communities around Ireland. In 2010 it won an IFTA

P-Star Rising by Gabriel Noble (USA, 2009)

When Jesse discovers that his youngest daughter, Priscilla, can rap and perform, he sees redemption for his own failed music career and financial salvation for his family and commits his life to making her a star. We follow the father-daughter duo through the grit and glamour of the music industry, capturing the daily struggles of a single parent raising his two children alone, and the sacrifices a child makes in order to make her daddy proud.

As a graduate of the Theatre, Film and Television department at UCLA, Gabriel Noble founded and served as Artistic Director of Equal Opportunity Productions, an arts outreach organization whose mission was to use arts education to empower youth in Los Angeles, Cuba, and South Africa. He established theatre, music, and film residencies in classrooms around the world. In addition to working as a successful director, producer, and cinematographer for Film and Television, Gabriel teaches film for The Pearson Foundation.

Mario and Nini by Chloe Ruthven (UK, 2009)

In 2001 the Chloe Ruthven got a job in a London primary school working with children who were not succeeding in class. Mario and Nini, aged 8, are two of those children, and over the next seven years she filmed their sessions together in school, and later out of school as they are enticed by gangs, guns and crime. As well as a gripping and intimate insight into these boys' lives, the film asks whether the school system we are providing is really working by showing how responsive two ‘failing’ boys are to an alternative model.

Chloe Ruthven is an artist/filmmaker who works with children at risk of social exclusion. She trained in Fine Art at St. Martin’s School of Art and exhibited as a painter for several years before moving into politically motivated performance art. In 2000 she began working with pupils at a referral unit in Surrey, and from there developed a method of using film that involves participants in the process with the aim of empowering them to bring about social and emotional change in their own lives. She went on to work in schools across London combining filmmaking with reintegrating children into education. As well as making films with specific groups of young people, she runs a London wide programme for teaching children how to make films. Mario and Nini is her first feature length film.