Sibenik - International Children's Festival

It has been forty-six years of socialising for Šibenik, me and children! The festival of children or for children? This used to be a crucial question! But today, what importance does it have?!? The only important thing is that this is a festival of play, a festival of joy and goodness and above all a festival of infinite fantasy. Children's fantasy, no matter how old you are!

Through years I used to leave, to run away to be precise, in order to do some «more serious» jobs. However, I would wait impatiently for June and the first chords of the festival song «Zdravo maleni» (Hello kids). It was a warning. It was an invitation to forget everyday, often unnecessary concerns and to reach a weightless, spaceless and timeless limitation.

Thus, for forty-six years I have been witnessing some other children gradually taking over not power and jobs as we tend to think but rather happiness and fun! Some fifteen years ago there was only a puppet show workshop, now there are about twenty different workshops. When I was a child some of the terms such as roller skaters, skateboarders or surfers did not exist, they could not be traced in the most comprehensive dictionaries of the time!

The ceremonial theatrical curtain is a work of children's fantasy and children's hands! The motifs of the Krka waterfalls, the cathedral and the islands of Kornati are the subjects of children's graphics or street mosaics! And the festival bulletin tells its own story! Since it was taken over by children, it has had plenty of critical reviews but without malevolent criticising, plenty of exhaustive reports without boring philosophising, countless witty jokes but without insults!

These children have done something that Pipi did not manage to do. All this without help of a greater celandine! They have managed to grow up but not get old! To get serious without losing the sense of beauty and imagination! To sum up, they have managed to believe and act according to the saying: «Poetry is not in tea but in making tea.»

www.mdf-sibenik.com