Inside Out: Portraits of Children (1997)

Documentary filmmaker Joanna Lipper sat down with a dozen children from America, Ireland and England and let them interpret the world in this look at the internal life of children, sharing their dreams, wishes and hopes. An American boy talks about his Hungarian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust; two African-American girls speak of their imaginative fantasies and a boy who lives in a New York shelter discusses his drawings. Interviews are interwoven with fantasy sequences based on the children's play, highlighting the realness and importance of the children's mental life. Lipper says she not only wanted to record these children's dreams and fantasies, but also examine how different lifestyles and beliefs affected children's imaginations.