Kinofilm Festival makes it return in May proudly presenting the 20th Anniversary Edition, marking two decades of championing short films and emerging filmmakers. This year’s festival, runs from 12th–18th & 29th May 2025, and embraces a distinctly European Edition, shining a spotlight on the best of European Short Films. As our Spanish and Italian partners would say lets all celebrate the “festival de cortometrajes” or “festival di cortometraggi”, whichever it is we hope you enjoy our fine selection of UK and European “Court MĂ©trage”
But first, with over 30 years behind us we feel its important to give an overview of the history of Manchester’s Kinofilm Festival. Kino was founded in 1993 as the Kino Film club by our director John Wojowski, who previously managed and programmed the legendary independent Aaben Cinema in Hulme in the 80s. Following its closure in 1990, John left Manchester for a period of travel taking in a short term contract as one of the Managers at the Scala Cinema in London, following which he moved back up North and was involved in established the 051 Cinema in Liverpool where he worked for 2 years as Manager/Programmer. As Manchester was his true home he came back to Manchester in late 1993 and set up a local film society known as the Kino Film Club which was the beginning of Kinofilm.
Over the next two years Kino presented many seasons and festivals of cult cinema and movie classics throughout the 90s with a roaming pop up 16mm cinema in over 30 Manchester Venues, the most famous of these being The LlOYDS pub in Chorlton and the Arts Centre on Blackfriars Street (where it all started) on the border of the city centre and Salford. Finally the club settled down to run regular nights in the city centre’s Oldham Street venues CAFE POP and NIGHT & DAY, at the forefront of the Northern Quarter evolution. Furthermore the cult movie nights were interspersed throughout the 90s with regular monthly short film nights inspired by Exploding Cinema group eventually setting up our short film nights which became known as Kino Shorts, and still continue today.
The first Kinofilm Festival took place in October 1995 at Manchester’s classic Odeon Cinema (sadly now demolished to make way for an office tower block – that’s progress!). Since then, Kino has spent the last 30 years presenting various film festivals in Manchester, including two editions of our infamous American Underground Short Film Festival, three editions of the Kino Irish Film Festival, two editions of our specific home grown British Short Film Festival, and two previous editions of European Cinema. Over these years our earlier festivals took place in many venues including not only the ODEON CINEMA, but CORNERHOUSE, AMC, Withington’s CINE CITY and the PRINTWORKS (ODEON) cinemas, and for several years at the GREEN ROOM ARTS CENTRE (up until its demise). For our 10th anniversary we even hired in a huge articulated lorry converted into a mobile cinema and toured the festival to the 10 districts of Greater Manchester.
Lets not forget our international touring programme, over the years we taken Kino to many international film festivals including in France (Clermont Ferrand), Germany – Berlin (Interfilm) and Hamburg (Kurtzfilm), Australia (Flickerfest), Brazil (San Paulo SFF), and the USA (New York and LA).
Though out this period we have shown thousands of short films and we are proud to have supported an equal number of new and young filmmakers, many that have gone on to produce features and to become well known award winning filmmakers.
This year we celebrate 30 years since the first Kinofilm Manchester Short Film Festival and we proudly present our 20th anniversary of the short film festival with a special European Edition. We look forward to see you join us for our opening programming at the UoS Media City on Monday 12th May and for the rest of the week at Mini Cini, Ducie Street Warehouse (13th – 18th) and at our partners’ Instituto Cervantes on Thursday 29th May for our Spanish programme.
Full programme details of this year’s festival to be announced mid April and tickets will be on sale from the end of April. Delegate and filmmaker passes will be available as soon as the programme details are announced, please watch this space.
Browse the video gallery at this Archive link to see some of our archive videos. We will soon have some photos from our archive on the site as soon as we have the time to add them so do check back.
