About the Programme
Ale Kino! as an experience of togetherness and shared emotion
Ale Kino! is not just a film festival — it’s a shared experience centred on film, but drawing its strength from encounter too. From meeting another person, from new perspectives, and from emotions we share with others.
We treat young audiences as partners and co-creators of the festival’s narrative. The Festival is a space where young people can develop their own view of cinema, voice their opinions and have a real influence on its shape. On the opening day of the Festival, we will present a selection of short films chosen by participants of the Ale Kino! Klub workshops (ages 11–13). Their favourite titles will also be reviewed by the Young Programming Council, made up of people aged 16–18. Its voice has become an important part of the selection process, bringing in the perspective of young viewers themselves and the way they engage with contemporary cinema.
About the festival screenings
The Festival programme has been designed so that everyone can find their own way through more than a hundred screenings and accompanying events. A range of programme strands helps audiences find proposals suited to different interests and sensibilities. In the coming months, we’ll be gradually revealing this year’s themes.
Every screening is an invitation to a deeper encounter with film. Screenings are preceded by short introductions that help young viewers and their families notice context, themes and cinematic devices. Post-screening conversations are also an important part of the festival experience — meetings with filmmakers, experts and special guests that allow audiences to look at films from different perspectives and share their own reflections. We believe conversation is a natural extension of the screening. Many festival screenings are accompanied by workshops, performative activities and projects that engage the audience.
The Ale Kino! programme includes offerings for a range of audiences — families with children, schools, and individual viewers, both teenage and adult. These include weekend family screenings, sensory-friendly screenings for the youngest viewers, genre-focused strands (including anime, Christmas films and sports-themed films), and the latest screen adaptations of popular books, presented as part of the Book on Screen section, run in partnership with publishers.
We also invite audiences to a new instalment of classic cinema — Young Classics — which we’ve programmed in partnership with FINA since last year, and which offers an excellent opportunity for an intergenerational cinema outing.
A unique element of the programme is Secret Screenings — surprise showings held in unexpected spaces, encouraging audiences to discover cinema beyond the traditional screening room.
We believe the festival is more than a place to present films. It’s a space for building a community around cinema — open, diverse and curious about the world, where every voice matters and taking part is just as important as the stories seen on screen.
The Festival also means the International Competition
The International Competition is a selection of the most interesting films for young audiences made between 2025 and 2026. The Competition presents works that showcase the diversity of contemporary cinema for young audiences, set new directions for its development, and open up space for discussion about the experiences of children and young people.
The Competition features feature-length and short films: fiction, animation and documentary. This diversity of forms, styles and storytelling approaches allows us to look at contemporary cinema for young viewers from many angles — from intimate stories rooted in the everyday lives of children and teenagers, through accounts of important social and emotional experiences, to bold formal experiments and new ways of depicting the world.
We select films distinguished by an original cinematic language, high artistic quality and attentiveness to the contemporary experiences of young people. We believe young viewers deserve cinema that is diverse, ambitious and full of artistic exploration — cinema that doesn’t simplify the world, but helps make better sense of it.
Many of the films presented in the Competition win acclaim at the world’s most important film festivals — in Berlin, Cannes, Locarno or Annecy — while remaining unavailable to Polish audiences due to a lack of national distribution. Ale Kino! Festival gives them a space to meet audiences and the chance to discover stories that might otherwise go unnoticed.
For audiences, filmmakers, educators and industry representatives alike, the Competition becomes a place for discovering new talent, exchanging experiences, and reflecting on the future of cinema for young viewers.
