Film industry figures curate 25 essential films for under-25s amid AI content fears
Directors, critics and heads of major European cultural institutions have selected a canonical list of films for young viewers, positioning deliberate curation as an antidote to algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content.
A coalition of filmmakers, critics and leaders of institutions including the British Council, the Barbican and Film4 has assembled a list of 25 films they consider essential viewing for anyone under 25, spanning from The Wizard of Oz (1939) to documentaries released this year.
The project is framed explicitly as a response to what its contributors see as a crisis of passive consumption. The curators cite "AI slop and doom-scrolling" as forces degrading how young people encounter moving images, and invoke Orson Welles' warning to aspiring viewers: "Don't be marinated, don't soak yourself in films."
Curation as cultural policy
The list reads less as a ranking than as an argument for intentionality. Contributors were asked to name films that are "joyful, imaginative and thought-provoking" rather than merely popular. The selections lean heavily on European and Japanese authorship alongside Hollywood staples: Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro and Princess Mononoke all feature.
Briony Hanson, the British Council's director of film, chose The Wizard of Oz, calling it a film that "changed my life" at age six. Rebecca Fons, head of cinema at the Barbican, selected Princess Mononoke, noting that in Miyazaki's work "children are often more capable of achieving wisdom than the rigid adults trying to make the old ways endure."
A counter-programme to the feed
Several contributors emphasised the list as a corrective to screen-time anxiety rather than a rejection of screens altogether. Elizabeth Karlsen, the producer behind films including Carol, recalled leaving a 1999 matinee of Run Lola Run "completely envious and fizzing with excitement, desperate to make a movie that very day."
Edgar Wright, who chose The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, described encountering Demy's sung-through pastel musical as a teenager with no smartphone to fall back on: "There was nothing else on and iPhones didn't exist yet, so I went and it changed me."
The youngest entries on the list target children as small as one year old, with director Tom Nicoll selecting Disney's Fantasia for the child he expects this autumn. The oldest contributor picks extend to 2025 documentaries on Gaza and Israeli settlements, signalling that the curators see civic engagement as part of the brief.
The exercise stops short of prescribing policy, but its institutional weight – the British Council promotes British culture in over 100 countries, while Film4 is Channel 4's production arm – gives it a quasi-official character at a moment when European governments are debating platform regulation and children's screen exposure.
