Five years of building cinematic bridges between young European audiences from Poland, France, Italy, Portugal, and Ukraine. Initiated by the Krakow Film Festival, the Docs4Teens project is celebrating its modest anniversary! This year’s exceptionally rich programme once again brings together the very best in documentary cinema for young people.
Together with colleagues from Fipadoc, Dei Popoli, Docudays UA, and Porto/Post/Doc, we have been building a splendid, well-coordinated team for five years now. We curate the programme together, seeking out films that will resonate with young audiences from each of our countries, remarks Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła, founder of the Docs4Teens project and Director of the Krakow Film Festival.
“We are enthusiasts who believe in cinema and see it as an excellent educational tool that teaches empathy and sensitivity. We are delighted that teachers share this vision, for it is through their openness that we can reach an ever-growing number of pupils. The programme is extremely rich but, above all, it is engaging and thought-provoking – we are fully aware of this, which is why we are holding workshops and discussions with experts after each screening, providing an ideal complement to the stories shown on screen,” adds Magdalena Walo, coordinator of the festival’s Kids & Youth Fest section, which screens film from the Docs4Teens project.
The diverse Docs4Teens programme serves as an excellent starting point for initiating dialogue with young people about issues affecting their peers across the globe. The documentaries selected for the project address current and universal themes such as the need to belong, developing one’s passions, environmental activism, the search for identity, and migration.
The aim of the Docs4Teens initiative is to bring young people throughout Europe closer together through documentary cinema. The Krakow Film Festival (Poland), Festival Dei Popoli (Italy), Porto/Post/Doc (Portugal), Docudays UA (Ukraine), and FIPADOC (France) actively support the promotion and distribution of documentary films to make them more accessible to young audiences. As part of the fifth edition of Docs4Teens, each festival will present selected titles from 14 specially curated documentaries aimed at audiences aged 12-16.
The selected films will be screened in 2026 during the festivals FIPADOC (France, January), Dei Popoli (Italy, November), Porto/Post/Doc (Portugal, November), Docudays UA (Ukraine, June), and at the 66th Krakow Film Festival (Poland, May-June), where five titles will be presented across three thematic blocks.
All films selected for the fifth edition of Docs4Teens:
- Voy, dir. Kilian Armando Friedrich, Germany, 16’, 2024
- Simple Divine, dir. Melody Boulissiere, Bogdan Stamatin, France, Romania, 14’, 2024
- Tough Moves, dir. Jakob Michal, Germany, 15’, 2024
- The Castle, dir. Danny Biancardi, Virginia Nardelli, Stefano La Rosa, Italy, 2025
- How I Spent My Summer Holidays?, dir. Antonio Lukich, Ukraine, 15’, 2025
- Mirtemir is Alright, dir. Sasha Kulak, Michael Borodin, Germany, Uzbekistan, 19’, 2025
- All the Colors of Youth, dir. Agnieszka Kalińska, Poland, 18’, 2025
- Jump!, dir. Michał Cysewski, Poland, 15’, 2025
- A Good Mind Grows in Thorny Places, dir. Katarína Gramatová, Slovakia, 20’, 2024
- +10K, dir. Gala Hernández López, France, Spain, 30’, 2025
- Girls don’t cry, dir. Sigrid Angelika Klausmann, Lina Luzyte, Germany, 90’, 2025
We invite organised school groups to complimentary screenings and workshops with experts, taking place on 1-3 June at the Mikro cinema in Kraków. For detailed information and screening reservations: [email protected]
The Krakow Film Festival is on the exclusive list of film events qualifying for the Academy Awards® in short film categories (fiction, animation, documentary) and feature-length documentary, the European Film Awards in the same categories, and serves as a qualifying event for the BAFTA Awards.
The Krakow Film Festival is organised with financial support from the City of Krakow, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Polish Film Institute, and the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme. The Polish Filmmakers Association serves as co-organiser.
The 66th Krakow Film Festival will be held in cinemas from 31 May to 7 June 2027 and online on KFF VOD from 5 June to 19 June 2026.