About festival
In 2014 the 54th annual International Film Festival for Children and Youth will take place in Zlín. It will take place from May 30 to June 5, 2014
Zlín’s festival is one of the largest and oldest festivals of its kind in the world. The structure of the festival’s program is centered first and foremost on the target group of children and youth. The main competitive sections are focused on feature films for children and youth, animated films for children. Attention is also given to new European filmmakers in the feature-length European Debuts section. The main prize of the International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlín is the Golden Slipper.
In recent years the festival’s film projections have been held not only in Zlín itself, but also in a number of other towns in the Czech Republic. Attendance at Zlín’s festival is continuously rising. The number of visitors to the 53nd annual festival in 2013 approached the magic number of 95 000 children and adults!
One of the most noteworthy projects of the rich supporting program is the well-known Cinematrain – a railway car adapted as a screening place that that starts two weeks before festival and pilgrims with the film across the Czech republic. The International Film Festival for Children and Youth thus “unloads” films by train to children at dozens of small towns that lack their own cinemas.
There is also a huge response each year to the auction of film clapperboards, which is a project to generate financing for student film productions and budding filmmakers. And it is not only prominent Czech artists and other distinguished personalities who create these creative art works on film clapperboards throughout the year. The collection is then put on display and auctioned off during the film festival. The proceeds of the auction then enable young filmmakers to shoot films.
The established tradition of a regular film festival in Zlín was the logical outcome of efforts by local filmmakers to showcase their own productions in a local environment. The first annual festival took place in 1961, exactly 20 years from the execution of another Zlín film festival, which was the Film Harvest (or Zliennale). Although these predecessors to Zlín’s later film festivals took place in the war years of 1940 – 1941, they attracted a significant amount of attention from the public and independent filmmakers. The Film Harvest was festooned with the presence of most of the stars from that period’s extremely productive and internationally successful Czech and Slovak cinematography. The main program was housed at Zlín’s Grand Cinema, which at that time was the largest cinema hall in Central Europe. The capacity of the building, which was completed in 1932, was at that time for an audience of more than 2500 people. Films are still shown in the Grand Cinema today and the opening festival ceremony is also held there regularly along with screenings of the most popular films of the festival.
The Film Studios in Zlín were established in 1936 from Jan Antonín Bata’s initiative to create a studio for the production of advertising spots for the Bata shoe empire. The development of artistic productions in Zlín was significantly due to (among others) the director and screenwriter Elmar Klos who, along with Ján Kadár, was awarded an Oscar for best foreign language film of 1965 for their film The Shop on Main Street. Zlín’s film studios have dedicated themselves to the production of children’s film since the beginning of the 1940s. Over time Zlín’s studios became the most significant centre of film production for children in former Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of feature, animated and combined films have been shot here. Many of them have won prestigious awards or even, as in the case of Karel Zeman, world renown. Aside from Zeman, other filmmakers working in Zlín have made their mark on the history of world cinematography: Hermína Týrlová, another Oskar-winning filmmaker Alexander Hackenschmied, Břetislav Pojar, Josef Pinkava and others. This celebrated filmmaking tradition continues today in Zlín at two film schools, and connecting both film and filmmaking traditions together gives Zlín’s festival a character of uniqueness. Each year two areas of the film world are united at the site of such remarkable history: the spectatorial and the creative.
The town of Zlín, famous worldwide as the cradle of the Bata company, is unique not only for film production, but also for its unique functionalist architecture, which has been remarkably applied to a large urban complex. You will find Zlín in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, a country that came into being in 1993 after the completely peaceful division of Czechoslovakia. The Czech Republic is sometimes called the Heart of Europe because of its geographical location in the center of the Old Continent and it is famous for its relationship to cinematography, not only because of the continuous birth of new outstanding film works in our country, but also because filmmakers from all over the world are invited to come and present their films at a number of our film festivals. And if they are coming for films for children and young audiences, it is undoubtedly the famous International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlín. We look forward to seeing you at our festival, 30 May – 5 June, 2014!
Zlín, Czech Republic, Europe
