"That rarity: a poetic comedy that's truly funny" (Pauline Kael). Don't miss the first Toronto screening in well over a decade of Truffaut's "well-nigh perfect" (Richard Roud) comedy about children. Truffaut broadens his canvas and lightens his tone to make a lovely, funny exploration of that frightening territory known as childhood. Using over 200 non-professional child actors, he developed several vignettes about the daily passions and humiliations of pre-adolescent life in provincial France. Each story has its rewards, and Truffaut's loving knowledge of the children's secret lives pays off in hilarity and poignancy; the sequence about the girl punished for not putting on a dress is, as they say, priceless. Truffaut himself plays one of the parents. "An original, a major work... Lilting, marvelously funny and wise" (Vincent Canby, The New York Times).