Four days full of pitches and conference programmes, plenty of networking opportunities, and accompanying side programmes, The Kids Kino Industry international co-production forum took place on 27-30 September in Warsaw and online.
Each year Kids Kino Industry brings more and more Decision Makers and attendees. This year, for the first time, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, VRT Ketnet, Wild Bunch, Latvian Television joined the event. This growing number of participants contributed to the decision of changing the venue from Muranów Cinema to Kinoteka Cinema, located in one of the most recognisable buildings in Warsaw – the Palace of Culture and Science. Audiences gathered in Kinoteka and in front of their computers to watch 27 pitchings during two days of project presentations.
Among the awarded projects were two Polish projects: Tosia (Audiovisual Technology Center Award) and Under the Floor (CEE Animation Forum Award), Slovak My World Upside Down, and Latvian Secrets of the Great Bog (both recieving the ORKA Production Award), and Ghoul Friends from UK (m:brane Award)s.
The hybrid form of the forum extended the possibility of having 1:1 meetings. This flexible approach paid off with a higher number of confirmed meetings booked through the platform (399 confirmed meetings compared to 237 last year). Parallel to the forum there have been plenty of different programmes for scriptwriters, producers and students.
The final session of Kids Kino Lab script development workshop ended an almost one-year journey with 12 teams from Poland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Norway, and the UK. Some of the projects developed at Kids Kino Lab were presented during the pitching presentations at Kids Kino Industry.
Also, for the second time, Warsaw was visited by the European producers selected for the Producers LINK programme to stimulate the production of top-quality children’s content and pan-European co-productions. After the first residency at Kids Kino Industry, producers selected for the programme will visit Amsterdam to take part in the second session at Cinekid for Professionals.
And organised for the first time, the Young Talents programme, brought six up-and-coming filmmakers representing the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (Poland), the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg (Germany), and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague – FAMU (the Czech Republic). The aim of the programme is to introduce young filmmakers: producers, directors, scriptwriters to the international film industry and show them how to navigate their careers and how to get the most out of the forum.
The next Kids Kino Industry forum will take place in September 2023. The call for projects for pitching will open in the first quarter of 2023.
