Invisible Work: A Conversation about Kids and Festivals with Catherine Bray

Being at a film festival can be a strange experience. Take Cannes. As an attendee, you have first access to the year’s biggest films and a chance to sip expensive (free) champagne while overlooking the deep blue Mediterranean sea. Yet your basic needs – solid sleep, regular meals, exercise – will go unmet for the entire time, what with all the screenings, queues, and meetings, not to mention the rushed walks between all these rendezvous and the struggle to keep up with emails (which mainly concern screenings, meetings, and queues).

That’s something I didn’t think too much about until I had a baby. Four babies are born every minute across the world, though you wouldn’t register that at these big festivals; children are rarely seen. As a festival programmer, I understand that the circuit is largely a professional realm, but it’s a big ask for people to be there for the long time and days a festival demands, and expect guests to be severed from other domains of life. Having no family nearby, a partner in tow who also works as a critic, and not being able to afford a carer or nanny, I had no idea how I might continue to attend festivals with a small child. 

But when I shared those concerns with European film industry workers like festival programmer Aurélie Godet, film marketing strategist Sarah Caldéron, and film consultant Olimpia Pont Cháfer, I realised they were in similar situations with their own little ones. Sarah, who runs her own company, The Film Agency, suggested we officially lobby the bigger festivals to provide childcare services for their guests. So we organised ourselves and started with the Marché du Film, Cannes’ sprawling film market. Soon thereafter, the Red Balloon Alliance was born.

Over the past seven years, the Red Balloon Alliance has helped set up creches and family-friendly solutions at festivals like Cannes, San Sebastián, Berlinale (which admittedly already did have a smaller, under-the-radar childcare operation), Punto de Vista, Valladolid’s Seminci, and Annecy. It has helped bring together a community of industry professionals who all have kids – filmmakers, sales agents, distributors, critics, programmers – with the aim of making their festival trips somewhat easier, swapping tips about babysitters, cafes with decent children’s menus, fun parks to go to, etc. Naturally festivals cannot provide 24/7 care, and parents still have to make small sacrifices, especially in the evenings. But the Alliance is still proof that these things can be done, and a reminder that maybe we all need to slow down, breathe – and play! – a bit more in such fast-paced events.

It’s exciting to see more awareness and discussions around what it means to be a parent (or any sort of carer) in the film industry, also thanks to organisations like Raising Films (UK), Reel Families for Change (USA), and the newly-established Cinecamp, which just put together their inaugural, terrific-looking creche and kids program at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies this April. We wholeheartedly applaud all these fests for their efforts to provide such services. But there is still much work to be done, and still a great deal of mystery around what a day at a film festival with one’s child might look like. 

To investigate a bit further, I chatted with film producer and critic Catherine Bray, who, since having a child in 2024, has continued doing her work and attending festivals with a small human at her side – plans in place and carers at the ready to make it work. I have admired Catherine’s can-do attitude and can see why she is an excellent film producer and film brain in general; I really hope other industry professionals will look to her as someone to emulate if they do choose to have children.

Over the last twenty years, Catherine has been writing on film for The Guardian and Variety, and is now a critic at Screen International. A former commissioner for Channel 4, she currently consults on behalf of the British Council with most major international film festivals. Among the most recent films she produced with her company Loop is Charlie Shackleton’s feature documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which premiered at Sundance in 2025 and won the main prize in the festival’s Next section.

How many festivals did you go to last year?

Five – last year we started with Sundance, then Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Edinburgh and Venice. And this year it has been just Berlinale so far and then we’ll go to Cannes in May and then Venice in August, and possibly some other ones, too. My son’s first festival was Edinburgh 2024, when he was three months old. Where I go, he goes. 

Last year was unusual as I was working as a critic but also my film Zodiac Killer Project, directed by Charlie Shackleton and which I produced, was playing at some of those festivals. That’s why I was at Sundance and Karlovy Vary, and Edinburgh was dual-function. It’s a lot to do five big festivals a year with a little one, the right amount feels about three, so this year will likely be Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. 

Were there different challenges attending a festival with a small child as a filmmaker as opposed to a critic? 

At festivals, as a filmmaker or critic, it’s quite a similar thing. Obviously as a critic you are seeing more films, and as a filmmaker you are invited to more events. When my son was really little at Sundance we went to a lot of filmmaker brunches and afternoon events and he could come along because he was so small. Probably more than my role shifting it’s the fact that children change so much when they are tiny and what you can do at a festival will vary depending on their age. 

It’s great he could attend the daytime events with you. Did you feel you had to relinquish a fair bit of night-time socialising?

Yeah. At Sundance they aren’t able to offer a creche. But we came to Sundance on a grant from the UK Global Screen Fund and we (my production company, Loop) included a line in the budget for childcare, so we were able to take a friend with us, who had a lot of experience with children, and he did some childcare in the evenings.

Festivals are so intensive, not least for the amount of socialising they require. Perhaps having to care for someone else might provide a bit of balance to the overall experience. 

Well, this isn’t a criticism of the festival (laughs) but my favourite thing at Berlinale this year was taking my son to the Lego store in the Sony Centre and playing with him there. One of my favourite things about parenthood is that you get to play with your kid; I really enjoy doing that. So I think there is always the novelty factor: they are constantly changing in what they want to do. I have been a film critic for 20 years; I know what that 6 pm drinks is going to be like. Whereas with each thing I’m experiencing with my kid, I’m experiencing it fresh, so there is that sense of discovery and wonder that perhaps wasn’t there for me in the later years of my career before I had a baby. 

When you go to a festival with your kid – even when you know the city already – you are, in addition to planning your festival for whatever you need to do there, always also planning a family holiday. 

I’ve been to Cannes every year since 2012, apart from the year where I was literally giving birth during Cannes, and I would usually bother to go to the beach maybe every other year, if that. But going to the beach with my kid was so lovely, he was experiencing things. I think Cannes was the first time he went in the ocean and took his first steps. 

Yes, at one-year you have all those milestones!

So you’re forming all these core memories for yourself as well as your child. Forget baby sensory classes, you are taking them to all these interesting places. I remember at Karlovy Vary we were sitting in the shadow of this incredible brutalist structure, with people sitting around in the park playing music on these portable stereos. Then I was walking around with my kid and he was so delighted by all of it. He was going up to girls having their picnic and waving at them. It feels like a wonderful way to introduce him to different parts of the world. 

The author Jamie Glowacki talks about how children thrive if they are at the centre of their family’s life but the family’s life doesn’t revolve entirely around them. So you’re not doing kid-focused activities 24/7 – that would drive everyone crazy. Taking him to a brunch in Venice is just as interesting to him as going to a Pizza Hut at home, but it’s way more interesting for me! 

The team behind Zodiac Killer Project picking up their award at Sundance

Coming back to life as a film critic, it’s a pretty tight-knit community. And pretty social.

One of the nice things about being at a film festival is that my son has all these festival friends, film festival aunties and uncles, some of whom live in London but that he sees more of when we are away than he would when we’re at home. My friend Laila Latif, who is a great critic, she’s really into my son and she took him to the park maybe three times the last time we travelled. So I’m really lucky that people are excited to see him and hang out. 

Do you feel when you are with him at these events that your attention is split or does he feel organically integrated into the conversation? 

I think it is integrated but once I do go back to my apartment and it’s just us hanging out I think it is easier to switch off from the festival than it would have been before I had a baby. I used to have the attitude of being at the festival as a 24/7 thing. Maybe it was hard to switch off from that idea of yourself as a film critic, that that is the totality of your being; you are your job, that kind of culture. But that’s just me, I’m not saying other people are that way. I know a lot of critics that I really respect are very good about taking themselves off to see a museum or have a swim. I think that’s really important and something that the film industry as a whole needs to get better at doing. 

So you don’t feel like you have too much FOMO at festivals? 

Sometimes there will be a big party everyone’s at that I see on Instagram, and I’m at home with my child asleep. I don’t get FOMO when I’m hanging out with him because I really love doing that. But then that’s where being older when I had a baby comes into it, because I have done that party many times before. 

It’s also hard because the child goes to sleep early in the hotel room and you have to basically sit in the bathroom all night with the door closed, on the toilet with your laptop!

Well now when I go to Cannes I stay ten minutes out of town in an affordable two-bedroom apartment with a nice balcony. It means you have to take the train, so for him it’s a nice little train adventure in the morning to go to the festival creche. I’ve done both versions, the hotel and the apartment at a festival, and with a child it is better to get an apartment if you can. 

How does having your kid with you change the logistics of being a critic at a festival like Cannes? 

The downside is that I see very little speculatively any more. I feel like I have to prioritise films that I have to see as part of my work, either as a festival consultant for the British Council – so UK films – or films I am commissioned to write about. So going to see the three-hour film in the Directors’ Fortnight if I have a free afternoon becomes trickier. I’ve still got some really big misses in terms of things I feel I should have seen and I haven’t. 

I think that just becomes the new normal for the next ten years at least.

And when the child is very small the available childcare hours at the creches in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice are lower because the children are so little, and that’s totally fine and as it should be. But I’m looking forward to him being able to spend a bit more time in the childcare setting as he gets older. And Venice, for example, once the child turns three, they do things like take them up into the mountains and to museums. It becomes more like a summer school setting, which I love for him. 

The kids badge at this year’s Berlinale Kindergarten

As a critic who is now a parent, has your perspective or worldview changed, either expanded or contracted, in such a way that you approach films differently when you write?

I feel like I’m more discerning about films that are aimed at children. Because I used to have this attitude of thinking that it could just be slop if it was for children, all family entertainment was somewhat similar for the child. And now I realise that’s not true at all. I’m not saying they have the best or most consistent taste in the world, but children do have preferences. So for The Guardian this week I gave a film a two-star review, whereas I think before I would have given it a three-star review. Children deserve quality entertainment, like anybody. 

Thank you, on behalf of all the parents, for doing that. 

And children also stand a better chance of developing better taste if you don’t just stick them in front of just whatever, on the basis that it’s for kids. 

And what about with grown-up films?

I do find it harder to watch films with topics like the death of a child. When I was pregnant I had about five films to review where pregnancies were a big feature of the film. One was a German historical film where a pregnant woman gets captured by the Gestapo and gives birth in gaol and then is guillotined, so that was quite upsetting to watch. And there were a lot of demon-pregnancy ones as well. 

At Berlin this year I reviewed the Competition film Nightborn (directed by Hanna Bergholm). It’s about a couple going through the postpartum period and their kid is perhaps maybe a demon or monster of some kind. And there is this detail in the film where she is trying to breastfeed and she’s bleeding. And if I had watched that before becoming a mother I would have thought that was part of the explicitly horrific genre side of the film. But now I know, actually, that can just happen! It’s just a detail taken from life. 

Do you ever get time to watch a random film, not for work or reviewing but just for pleasure?

My child’s godmother Julia Jackman (director of 100 Nights of Hero, 2025) and I like to get together and watch, shall we say, high-end trash. So we watched all of the ITV series The Hunting Wives – it’s not good – and we went to the cinema to see Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, with Sydney Sweeney, and I enjoyed that one. So I’m definitely gravitating towards stuff that looks like it’s going to be a good time. I’m aware, because you are more tired as a parent, that the more intellectually-challenging stuff that I used to try to watch has fallen off a bit. But I’m also aware that that tiredness is a temporary condition. 

One’s relationship to time changes as well. Also how your day becomes compartmentalised according to whether your child is having naps or not. 

He still has a two-hour daytime nap but I have a feeling those days are numbered and I’m not sure I’m really ready for that yet. I get a lot done in those two hours. If I’m feeling tired then I will watch a film for work, and if I’m full of energy then I will buzz around doing house stuff. 

It’s that delicious domestic calm until those first moments when you start hearing the creaking coming from the child’s bedroom.

Actually he naps on the living room floor! The other day I was doing something in the kitchen, I think the dishwasher, and I thought he was still asleep and I turned around and had the jump scare as he was just standing there. You know how children in horror movies sing to themselves, or are just suddenly standing there in a creepy way? That’s all drawn from real life as well – that’s not a horror film thing. 

To finish, are there more structural changes you think the film industry could make to make things easier for being a parent while working freelance in the film industry? 

Obviously you and your colleagues (at The Red Balloon Alliance) have done brilliant work with the festival creches and I wouldn’t be able to go to these festivals without the festival daycare available. I would love to see even more festivals thinking about this stuff. I think any festival that wants to call itself a top-tier festival should be looking at childcare options to help people. 

Something Venice does that is very good is that they will hook you up with trusted and vetted evening babysitters, as well as the daycare offerings, and I think more festivals could do that. I appreciate that it’s something that has to be handled really carefully. 

Extending that approach to travel would be great. My son is just about hitting the age where I have to pay for a whole other airplane ticket for him, so that’s about to get exponentially more expensive for me. But it’s not as if you open the floodgates and everyone will bring their child to festivals. It’s not for everyone. But it would be nice if some of the people with big bucks could think about subsidising travel for parents who want to bring their children – not my travel, but the child’s. 

This isn’t structural, but for people who are travelling and see someone travelling with a kid, it’s so appreciated when you offer to help in really small ways. We were seated in the priority section at Venice airport next to Guillermo del Toro and he offered spontaneously to watch my son while I went off to get water and some things. And he was offering us biscuits. Such a nice man. So one can think about whether they might want to offer help to watch the kid for five minutes if that parent needs to go to the toilet. I suppose people are worried about stranger danger but if you have the festival lanyard on and you are on your way to the same place you are pretty identifiable. 

And it’s just a pretty basic common courtesy. 

It’s quite prevalent on social media for people to moan about children being on flights. It is inconvenient, but there are many instances of travelling with other people that are inconvenient, and we ought to just suck it up. 

It’s an access issue. For someone who is a primary carer as I am, if people are saying, “why should there be childcare at a film festival?”, you are literally saying to me: “why should you be at this festival?” It’s like people who aren’t bothered about venues not being wheelchair-accessible at festivals, you are basically saying to that person, “I don’t care about whether you are able to attend or not.”