Ale Kino! Music Hits

With My Own Eyes

Not very young, but not that old yet. It will never be really aged, mostly thanks to its young audience. The Ale Kino! Festival is fed every year with fresh streams of cinemagoers. And very literally so: noisily, they spill into cinema rooms, carrying popcorn, coke, colourful gummy sweets and chocolate peanuts. I saw them with my own eyes.

There is no other festival of this kind in Poznań. There is no equal in Poland. Films for young audiences are seldom to be found on cinema posters, and if they appear, they are usually feature and adventure cartoons. This is fine as such pictures are also needed. A pity, though, that young cinemagoers do not have much of a choice; fed by commercial pap, they just consume whatever is on the menu. That is, the same things over and over.

The Organisers of the Ale Kino! Festival object to this state of affairs. All year round they travel round the world and watch, observe, peek and seek… only to bring films from various cultural backgrounds, sometimes very different from the Polish one, with varied subject matter and diverse artistic conventions. Films about familiar issues and very distant ones alike.

At the same time, Ale Kino! is really good fun; everyone who has visited it just once will agree that it has the feel of ‘playing truant’ about it. However, there is more to it than just a day off, a day spent leisurely in a cinema chair. There are emotions, images, places and people we would never see if we stayed at a school desk.

Marta Kaźmierska
A journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza