Sixty fifth grade students participated in a study that investigated how children learn from a nonverbal film. The students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions where they were presented individually with (1) a film story, (2) a silent version of the film, (3) a descriptive audio version of the film's content, or (4) the same story recorded by a storyteller. After viewing or listening, the students were asked to recount the story, to mime incidents from it, to draw inferences about the story content, and to express their opinions of the story. Findings indicated that in their recounting of the story, the students in all groups showed a good grasp of the content. However, media differences were found in the individual events they recalled, with children in the descriptive audio group giving longer retellings and those in the film group retelling more of the central story content. In the mime task, children who saw the film showed greater sensitivity to the changes of pacing in the story by varying the pacing of their movements. In addition, film group students exercised more freedom in their verbal interpretations of the story, while the storyteller group students remembered and drew upon the provided information when responding to inference questions. The results demonstrated the capacity for a strictly visual medium to provide a comprehensible story to children in a format that also allows for diverse inferences and interpretations of its content. (Materials used in the study are appended.) (FL)