May 14, 2009

Cinekid grows: festival also for schools

Cinekid grows: festival also for schools

Cinekid is growing. In order to give children a complete festival experience, the festival will be starting three days earlier - before the start of the autumn school holiday. This will allow Cinekid to meet the ever greater demand from schools for more media literacy. Cinekid will be held between 14 and 23 October, closing before the last weekend of the holiday. The festival will of course remain open to the general public.

Children will be stimulated to actively participate: to present their own TV shows, make their own media productions, take part in workshops, experiment with interactive installations and conduct conversations with Dutch and foreign makers of film, TV and media. In this way they will receive a complete educational programme.

"Half a million children aged between 5 and 18 are not socially active" is the message conveyed in Are all children able to participate?, a report published today by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. In many cases this is attributable to insufficient income, and it has a negative effect on children - social and emotional as well as cognitive and physical. In Amsterdam more than half of the young audience is of immigrant or non-Western parentage. They are over represented in their segment, and they participate less for cultural reasons, or because their parents are less well educated. But all children go to school, and Cinekid hopes in this manner to reach a broader audience and give disadvantaged children a chance of visiting the festival.

The complete Cinekid programme can be found from mid-September at www.cinekid.nl. This year it will be held in Amsterdam at the Westergasfabriek and in The Movies. In Amsterdam Cinekid is held between 14 and 23 October; Cinekid on Location will be held in more than 30 Dutch cities during, as usual, the regional autumn school holidays.

Not for publication:

For further information: Tyche van Bommel, Head of Marketing & Communication, t.vanbommel@cinekid.nl, 00 31 (0)20 531 78 90

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