Young audience is key to strengthening European cinematography and European festivals recognise the importance of cultivating a loyal and dedicated audience, continuously working to improve existing programs and developing new ones, aimed at young people. However, it is an established practice that film selection for young audiences is usually done by adults.
With the mission of reversing this practice and creating festival programs intended for young people and children, five established European festivals have joined forces to create a new network – Young Programmers for Young Audiences!, abbreviated as Young4Film.
The network consists of the International Film Festival Kino Otok – Isola Cinema, the Beldocs International Documentary Film Festival, the Vilnius International Short Film Festival, Piccolo Grande Cinema, and the Cinehill Film Festival.
The aim of the network is festival audience development and the promotion of European – especially non-national – films among primary and secondary school pupils and college students. The focus of the Young4Film project is the inclusion of young selectors in the festival team, where they will participate in the creation of the festival program and the creation of accompanying educational materials intended for the young audience of all festivals within the network. The materials will be made available to festival programmers, educators and teachers, in order to reach the target audience beyond the network itself and its partners.
In addition to the five European film festivals, the network’s activities also include three cultural organisations in the field of film education: A Bao A Qu (Barcelona, Spain), Meno Avilys (Vilnius, Lithuania) and Kijufi (Berlin, Germany).
The network’s collaborative approach to engaging young selectors relies on the original Moving Cinema methodology, which has been developed since 2014 by the team of the Catalan organization A Bao A Qu, in cooperation with international partners, and whose goal is to develop an engaged young film audience. This previous cooperation helped us to understand the importance of this goal, and in further efforts we will also take into account issues of sustainability, environmental protection, equal gender representation, inclusiveness, diversity, and seminality. With our expertise and enthusiasm, we will continue to pave the way in the innovative development of young audiences in order to become a reliable authority in this field and with our results and work inspire other festivals to include young people in the film selection process.
The Young4Film festival network 2023
We kindly invite you to visit the next edition of festivals in our network and find out firsthand or online how we involve young selectors in the creation of the program and thereby create a quality, diverse and refreshing film selection for a young audience. And don’t forget to pat us on the back if you see us around – it will be our pleasure to hang out and talk about our project. See you there!
Young audience is an indispensable cornerstone of any lively film culture and a value that Cinehill Motovun has strived to nurture since its very beginnings. Our film program for young people has always strived to be a point of encounter in which the youngest audience gets to meet different cultures and languages, a place for discovery of new worlds and stories, and above all, for unfettered enjoyment of cinematic art.
Therefore, we are extremely happy to have celebrated the 11th edition of the program for children and youth by joining the Young4Film network. As part of this collaboration, we have expanded the program for young people and presented it in a completely new guise, under a new name and concept that puts young audience at the centre.
The Timpetill program runs prior to Cinehill as a separate section of the festival and is part of the wider European project Young4Film, aimed at European film audience development through the education of young people, and includes all regional schools in Gorski Kotar.
Just as its literary inspiration, the Timpetill program is a world without adults. It is where children and young people rule and create, where the creativity and strength of youthful spirit permeates all spheres, from the selection of films to the program winners. The program was conceived with the idea of developing interest in the wealth of European stories and languages, and brings a handful of films from all parts of Europe to its young audience. Starting this year, its programming is done by young students from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and Vern University, while the winners were decided by the Young Jury.
An exciting program of feature and short films from all corners of Europe took its young audience on various adventures and addressed in an accessible way the problems and topics faced by the youngest members of our society. Among the seven feature films, there was a variety of styles and genres and even a few of the latest titles from world festivals.
YOUNG SELECTORS – the program was created by female students from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and Vern University. Their work included regularly viewing the selected films, followed by meetings and joint discussions about the films they had watched and various aspects of the selection process, dilemmas, artistic and social value of the films and their stories, how they fit into the target program, and the logistics of the selection process.
YOUNG JURY – seventh and eighth form primary school pupils from regional schools in Gorski Kotar followed the entire program and participated in the evaluation by discussing the films they had watched during that day.
YOUNG FESTIVAL ORGANIZERS – fourth and fifth form primary school pupils participated in the preparation of the cinema spaces, organisation and counting of audience votes, film announcements, communication with the audience, and promotion of the program on social media.
YOUNG ANIMATORS – two animation workshops were held as part of the Timpetill program, in which first and second form pupils commented on the animated films program intended for the youngest audience, and learned the basics of making animated films. They also learned how to use optical toys as precursors to film and made their own analogue animations.
The European project of the European Network of Film Festivals – Young Programmers for Young Audiences! (Young4Film) is held in coordination with the International Film Festival Kino Otok – Isola Cinema, with the support of the MEDIA sub-program of Creative Europe.