About the Festival
KUKI Festival
2 - 9 November 2025
2 - 9 November 2025
About the Festival
More than 7000 children and teenagers attended! We would like to express our heartfelt thanks for the huge turnout at this year's KUKI Festival! We are still buzzing with excitement about all the wonderful moments we experienced in the cinemas: packed auditoriums, fascinating film discussions with your students, and more filmmakers in attendance than ever before! Here are a few impressions from the festival week!
If you couldn't attend the award ceremony and are wondering whether your favorite film of the festival won a prize, you can read about the winning films and the fantastic jury statements here: The following links will take you to all the award-winning films and the wonderful jury statements.
The prizes were awarded by our wonderful jury classes! Thank you also for your commitment to watching so many films, discussing them together, and agreeing on a winning film. The laudatory speeches were an absolute highlight—and we were very happy to welcome so many of you to the award ceremony.
School collaborations with KUKI in 2026: Film selection and juries
Next year, we would like to collaborate with school classes as curators in the form of a workshop again. It is free of charge for the school, lasts between 3-5 days, and takes place during the project week before the summer holidays at your school for the age groups 12+ and 14+. Here is some information, impressions, and feedback from the TeenScreen workshops in 2025.
And we are happy to invite school classes to apply again to be juries for the age groups 6+, 10+, and 14+. The main work will take place during the KUKI Festival in November 2026. If you are interested, you are welcome to register now without obligation, and with a little luck, you will be there next year! Here you can find out more about the jury classes and their work this year.
Founded in 1982 in the squats of West Berlin as a Super-8 film festival, INTERFILM has gradually evolved to become an epic and audience-focused, Oscar-qualifying international short film festival with a distribution and sales agency. KUKI Young Short Film Festival Berlin grew out of interfilm’s small children’s section in 2008 and presently shows 13 programs of international shorts to young audiences aged 4-19. Held during the same festival week, interfilm and KUKI collectively present around 50 programs each year to an audience of approximately 20,000. While both festivals have a largely narrative focus, innovative film forms and fresh gazes can be found throughout all sections. Creative programming concepts have also brought forth interfilm’s legendary events including EJECT!, Sound & Vision and Full Dome, while KUKI’s great expertise centres on the involvement of teenage curators and in-depth film talks. The festival is accompanied by an extensive program of masterclasses, panels and talks featured at INTERFORUM for industry professionals and the interested public.
What's so great about short film?
While feature films often conform to a formula, the short form readily finds new ways to tell multi-faceted and daring stories. Independent from the commercial demands of big studios, investors and advertisers, a short film is usually less expensive and faster to produce, making it a more readily-accessible medium the world over. Thus, the short form tends to be more immediate, explorative, experimental, conscientious and authentic than the feature, bringing us closer to the world in profound, informative, empathetic and playful ways.
KUKI, Young Short Film Festival Berlin, has been campaigning for a diversity of perspectives since 2008. The films in our broad spectrum of programs deal with socially-relevant topics and raise questions, but they also inspire confidence and empathy. We believe in the power that lies in sharing stories and experiences. Wishing to inspire a fascination and appreciation of cinema in our young audience, we are committed to presenting the limitless creative potential of film by presenting a variety of form, technique and style. Encouraged by the input from our young audience, curators and juries and their astute comments and critical questions, we endeavour to remain true to our course of creating a festival that takes the interests and emotions of young people to heart.
