Festival

CHILDHOOD DELUSIONS 2025 IS HERE !!

Childhood Delusions: A Retrospective

🗓️ Sat, January 25th 2025

Spectacle Theater, Williamsburg

Year 1 (2022): 5 pm

Year 2 (2024): 7:30 pm

with filmmaker Q&As

Special thanks to Steve Macfarlane

Childhood Delusions Film Festival 2025

🗓️ Sat, February 8th 2025

Kent Theater, Flatbush, Brooklyn

Red Carpet: 7 pm

Screening: 7:30 pm

filmmaker Q&As

Afterparty at Sycamore Bar


The Big Night

90 minutes of delusional, magical childhood videos, action movies, class projects, animation, music videos, and so much more

*montages that bring together themes in childhood storytelling and creativity.

*supercuts of exceptional childhood works and strange creations.

*the delusionary auteur spotlight, showcasing a particularly grandiose childhood vision in its entirety.

*a Q&A with a few of the childhood filmmakers.

*an afterparty!

2024 Festival Highlights

PERIPHERAL

dir. Halley & Sasha Freger

Sisters Halley & Sasha Freger were enabled by their mother to make delusional works as children. This culminated in Halley’s award-worthy performance demolishing the family kitchen in PERIPHERAL, featured this year at CDFF.

In her Q&A, Halley commented that revisiting these old movies reminded her of why she continues making films today.

VIKING FILM

dir. Marc Weiss (1966)

CDFF was proud to screen Marc Weiss’s (Creator of PBS POV Docs) seminal 1966 high school production, VIKING FILM, featuring Marc and his buddies raid from Coney Island Beach into Manhattan, ultimately overtaking Belvedere Castle in Central Park.

GOLDTOE

dir. The Schindel Cousins

The Schindel cousins’ legendary James Bond spoof, GOLDTOE, made its silver screen debut at CDFF 2024. The event practically doubled as another Schindel reunion, with cousins appearing from all over the eastern seaboard. Here’s hoping the two other missing James Bum films turn up soon.

VENDETTA

dir. Steve Macfarlane

The festival’s first ever 🌟 Delusionary Auteur Spotlight 🌟 was given to filmmaker Steve Macfarlane for his brilliant work, VENDETTA. The film’s climactic image (Tom the cowboy riding away on his trusty stick horse Alyssa, completely oblivious to reality) perfectly embodies the way we like to move through life here at CDFF.

Congratulations Steve, on this major achievement!

The 2025 CDFF Delusionary Auteur Award

this could be yours.

Read more 👀

The New Yorker

on CDFF 2022

by Reyhan Harmanci

Screen Slate

on CDFF 2024

by festival alumnus Dan Schindel