The festival tailored for our youngest audience, KinoKino — International Film Festival for Children will have its special, 6th edition this year as part of the 19th Zagreb Film Festival (November 14 – 21), taking place in Urania — Space of Creation and Tuškanac Cinema, and part of the program will be available online on the kinoeuropa.hr platform.

Launched by the ZFF team in 2016 in order to present to the home audiences the rich selection of international films for children, and which is lacking in regular cinema programs, KinoKino offers a special and different experience of cinema for children turning it into a place of learning, socializing, talking, and fun.

The main competition program of KinoKino, composed of the most important recent children’s films from all over the world, will be screened at the main festival location Urania from Monday till Sunday. The new edition of the program First Time at the Cinema (FTATC) will be featured on Saturday at Tuškanac Cinema. It is a block of feature and animated films for preschool kids who are encountering moving pictures on the big screen for the first time. The selection of short feature films I Discover Every Day is divided into two blocks which the audience will be able to see on Saturday at Tuškanac Cinema and Sunday at Urania.

The award-winning films from the main program come from all over the world and there are four films from Scandinavia, from Finland, to Norway, to Iceland, and Denmark. With numerous festival awards from around the world, with the Zlin award a standout among them, the film Sisters – The Summer We Found Our Superpowers is an epic journey of two sisters through the Norwegian wilderness while searching for their father lost in the mountains. Shown at Berlinale in the Generation KPlus program, the film Any Day Now is a warm story about a boy from Iran who lives with his family in a refugee center in Finland. Just when he starts enjoying his holidays, they are notified their asylum has been rejected. Alongside our Zagreb audience, the film will be available to audiences around Croatia within our ZFF Travels program. The protagonists of the Belgian film SpaceBoy will learn that anything is possible in life. The film centers around Jim, an eleven-year-old who is obsessed with the universe and science. When he moves to another city due to his father’s job, he quickly finds an ally in Emma, with whom he embarks on an glorious adventure – the construction of a huge air balloon.

The Romanian representative in the main competition is the award-winning film The Sentries of the Delta about a group of children on summer holidays who clash with poachers on the Danube’s delta. Screened at one of the most famous children’s film festivals, the Italian Giffoni FF, the danish film Buster’s World tells a story of a confidently optimistic boy, always ready to help everyone around him, and who has a special mission – to become a popular magician! Another film shown at the prestigious Giffoni festival comes from Iceland – Birta, a film about a girl who decides to take things into her own hands in the middle of the family’s bad financial situation and starts thinking of creative ways to earn money so her family can afford a real Christmas. Mission Ulja Funk premiered at Berlinale and is another film from the selection whose protagonists are crazy about space exploration. This time, a girl named Ulja takes matters into her own hands, finds an ally in a classmate and manages to convince him to embark on a truly unusual adventure – they start their journey across Eastern Europe in a hearse in order to see an asteroid fall!

The best films of the 6th KinoKino will be decided, as every year, by a professional and children’s jury, while every cinemagoer will choose the audience award winner. The professional jury this year will feature actress Iva Babić, director Saša Ban, and professor and child literature expert Dubravka Zima, while the children’s jury will be made up from five primary school children from Zagreb.

During the KinoKino festival, cinemas also become learning spaces, so this year, as well, we will hold a workshop From Cinema to the Classroom: The Methodology of Teaching Short Films. Applications for the workshop are open until November 14 via the online form on the official festival page. Before the festival, we will hold the Read What You Watch workshop, intended for primary school kids. After they read a book on which a film was based, the participants will write a short review, and three of the best reviews will be announced and awarded during the festival. Applications are open for the My First Videogame workshop which is held annually in collaboration with HUB385, and in which participants produce a simple game by themselves.

The complete program and schedule of this year’s Festival will be announced along with ZFF’s program, on Wednesday, November 3, and all information on the workshops and educations are available on the official web page www.kinokino.hr.