Airport Kids

Cute kids in a world which never stands still

by Rosslyn Hyams

Article published on the 2008-07-09 Latest update 2008-07-09 14:53 TU

The festival's poster
(Photo: Francesco Raffaelli)

Swiss director Stefan Kaegi joins Argentinian Lola Arias to bring us Airport Kids, which looks at a cosmopolitan group of children attuned to a shrinking world.

Patrick is a child from Ireland, and speaks French and English.

Lausanne is his third home.  Not bad when you’re under 15, and had your first credit card at the age of ten.

He’s one of Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias’ Airport Kids

Border-crossing, globe-shrinking Kaegi from Switzerland is back in Avignon.

After taking audiences around in trucks with their real drivers, following model train hobbyists, and linking up audiences in Europe with call centres in India for a guided tour of Berlin, he hooks up with Arias from Argentina to create a sort of airport freight area where nine children aged from seven to 14, come in and out of their individually decorated cargo boxes.

All nine live or have lived in Lausanne, Switzerland, and all of have non-Swiss backgrounds.  Kaegi and Arias show us a society within a society, children who are different.

Nomads, mostly and well-off, speaking several languages, with ideas about the world and their own place in it. 

One of the character, Garima, was born in India, and then moved to Thailand before landing in Switzerland and, because she’s already moved on, we only see her on film on the side of her cargo box.

Kristina Kovalevskaya is ten, wears diamante-framed black sunglasses as she and the others drive off to the pool after their show. Oozing self-assurance, she describes herself as a third-culture child and her friends as unique. 

Like Sarah, whose father had fought in the army in Angola during its recent civil war, plays electric guitar and who has a snail companion called Whirlwind.

Queues of anxious spectators form in front of the ticket booths at the entrance to the Mistral High School Gym, just in case there are any returns.  Airport Kids are a big attraction.

They’re cute, they’re clever and maybe they’ll form a rock-band, if they stay together long enough.

Airport Kids directed by Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi is on at the Avignon Festival until 12 July.