The Bafta Film Awards introduces a new category to recognise the best in all-ages feature films.
From 1999 to 2022, Bafta presented an award for feature film at its annual Children’s Awards. In 2023, the academy announced the ceremony would fold and be incorporated into the annual film, TV and games ceremonies — which means that 2025 sees the introduction of the best children’s and family film category at the Bafta Film Awards.
Naturally, there is a big overlap with Bafta’s animated feature category, with 12 of the 16 eligible animations also submitted here. They join five scripted features and two documentaries, making 19 titles in total competing for the award — which for its first year, at least, is a wholly juried category.
Among the scripted features, Studiocanal and Heyday Films’ Paddington In Peru looks a strong contender, especially since the first two Paddington films both won the equivalent category when it was presented at the Bafta Children’s Awards. Squarely hitting the family audience is John Krasinski’s IF, about a young girl who can see the imaginary friends that were left behind when their real-life buddies grew up. The Paramount Pictures release grossed $190m worldwide.
From Sony’s Columbia Pictures is Gil Kenan’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which relocates the Spengler family from rural Oklahoma to New York City, and centres on 15-year-old Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), who is suffering a major bout of teenage alienation. Similarly telling the story of a teenager is Lionsgate’s White Bird, the Marc Forster-directed drama set in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. Adapted from RJ Palacio’s 2019 graphic novel, the film tells the story of a Jewish girl hidden by the family of a polio-affected classmate she had previously ignored.
Disney’s Young Woman And The Sea celebrates US swimmer Trudy Ederle (Daisy Ridley), who competed at the 1924 Paris Olympics while still a teenager, going on to become — at age 20 — the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel. Joachim Ronning directs and Jerry Bruckheimer produces.
Endurance likewise celebrates human endeavour, in this case the explorers under Ernest Shackleton’s command, who survived an ill-fated 1914 Antarctic expedition. Free Solo duo Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi direct jointly with Natalie Hewit, and the film combines dramatic reconstruction of the original expedition with sequences tracking a 2022 mission to discover the sunken wreck of its ship Endurance.
The film is one of two titles submitted to this category by National Geographic Documentary Films — the other is Blink, from Daniel Roher (Navalny) and Edmund Stenson. Blink documents Canada’s Pelletier family, who — faced with the prospect of three of their four children losing their sight because of a genetic disorder — set off on a bucket-list trip to allow them to experience the world’s beauty while they can still see it.
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