Launching a film festival is no easy task, no matter what city you’re in or what kinds of film you want to show. But as New Yorkers Eric Beckman and Emily Shapiro found out back in 1997, there are extra hurdles involved when you start with the words “children’s films.”

“In the beginning, I could just tell the picture that started playing in the heads of these filmmakers,” Mr. Beckman recalled. “As soon as you mentioned the words ‘Children’s Film Festival,’ they started thinking ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.'”

The misconceptions persisted to the point that Mr. Beckman sought out proactive ways to address the issue. At one point, he imagined specialized letterhead featuring animated images of Mickey Mouse and Barney, and two red circles with slashes going through the icons. “I wanted to say: ‘This isn’t the way we operate,'” he said. “Over and over, I found myself talking to filmmakers who reacted along the lines of ‘I’m not sure this is a movie for children.’ And I just started to become this broken record: ‘Don’t judge it through the lens of whether this will be nice for children. If it’s a great film, then it’s a great film for all age groups.'”

For the last 10 years, this mentality has made the New York International Children’s Film Festival, which returns to Manhattan on February 29 (tickets are now on sale at gkids.com), one of the biggest events of its kind in the world, with tickets selling out weeks before the first film reaches the screen. The festival specializes in movies accessible to younger audiences and strives to avoid the condescending or simplistic “family films” (see “Cheaper By the Dozen,” “The Game Plan”) that have become Hollywood staples. Year after year, Mr. Beckman has managed to encourage wary filmmakers to submit their work and enticed audiences young and old to give the event a try. Last year marked a pinnacle in audience interest, as nearly every screening in the two-week schedule sold out, drawing more than 20,000 paid attendees to the festival’s four venues (IFC Center, the Directors Guild of America theater, Symphony Space, and the Cantor Film Center).

And it’s not just parents, teenagers, and toddlers who have responded to the program. Mr. Beckman said what has elated him most in recent years has been the increasing number of “film people” in attendance. “Particularly the shorts,” he said, “which many returning audience members have come to recognize as one of the strongest shorts programs in the city.”

This year’s festival has crossed a threshold in terms of filmmaker participation, with some 2,500 solicited and submitted entries vying for a final list of 75 features and shorts. Taking only a cursory glance at this year’s catalog, it’s easy to get a sense of the weighty topics being embraced in the NYICFF environment, and how one morning’s “Shorts for Tots” screenings can give way to an afternoon of more sober, serious dramas.

One of this year’s more substantial centerpieces is Patricia Riggen’s drama of illegal immigration, “Under the Same Moon” (March 2, for ages 10 and older), which centers around a 9-year-old who sets out to cross the Mexican-American border, determined to reunite with her mother, who is hiding from the law in Los Angeles. Similarly, the festival’s opening night film, “Razzle Dazzle” (February 29, for ages 9 and older), is described as a cross between “Best in Show” and “All That Jazz,” a mockumentary about youth dance troupes in Australia and the drama playing out between the youngsters behind the curtain and their intense parents in the audience.

Aside from this year’s extensive shorts program, Mr. Beckman also singled out the Italian feature “Red Like the Sky” (March 2, for ages 10 and older), which will make its American premiere at the festival. In this story of a 10-year-old blinded by an accidental rifle shot, director Cristiano Bortone chronicles his young protagonist’s move from a public school to a specialized “school for the blind” as a horrific journey into an environment where kids are written off as disabled and useless — until the political uprising on the streets of 1970s Italy floods into the halls of the school as well.

Looking back at the years leading up to the very first NYICFF, Mr. Beckman said it was founded less out of a desire to start a film festival than to recognize a gaping hole in the city’s cinematic community. “At the time, in 1997, there was an amazing variety of films for adults, but when it came to kids, it was always the same kind of movie, something like ‘The Lion King’ or ‘Pocahontas.’ And not that those aren’t good movies, but they’re just one kind of movie.”

Every year since, Mr. Beckman said he has been forced to cope with the fundamental, “existential” question: What is a children’s film, anyway? And while it’s required a good deal of debate and deliberation, he points to the parents and children who have rallied around the festival, not to mention the film lovers and film professionals — the NYICFF’s all-star jury includes director Gus Van Sant, actor Matthew Modine, and Focus Features president James Schamus — who have helped him to find an answer.

“We’ve seen it pay off every year,” Mr. Beckman said. “As part of the audience award, we give ballots to both children and the adults, and in the early years, we started seeing this strange trend, that almost without fail parents would vote for the movie that seemed sweetest and nicest, and kids often chose the more challenging and interesting material. For us, it wasn’t just interesting, it was educational. The parents picked the happy option, and the kids picked the films that respected them enough to go serious. For them, that made it cool.”

ssnyder@nysun.com