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What we’re about

KinoBerlino has been the German capital's independent, volunteer-run short film initiative since 2004 and has been helmed by Dave Lojek, probably the most-often-selected director at cinema festivals in the 21st century, since 2007.

Our current fundraising effort will support our hands-on international Berlin Film Workshop from September 11 to 21, 2025, which we are organizing with a volunteer team.
In our annual KinoKabarets (ten-day intensive film workshops in the fall), we bring together approximately 120 volunteer producers, directors, actors, and film technicians who, together with musicians, artists, and authors, write, plan, shoot, edit, score, and present their own narrative, animated, experimental, and documentary works for the cinema.

They are given two four-day sessions at the venues for this purpose. Intrinsically motivated, all participants network organically under extreme time pressure and develop new ideas without censorship or sales intentions. This is how we created over 1,500 short films in the micro-cinema or guerrilla film segment in all genres.

These low-threshold workshops are the antithesis of the extremely privileged state film schools, which regularly reject 95% of their applicants. It is important to us to provide a larger community with access to experience, knowledge, and practical results in the spehere of cinematography. It's also great fun to create your own films, which we celebrate in the cinema.

At KinoBerlino, we cure the perfectionism of the inexperienced with the art of the feasible, because our short films don't have to sell. They float like free radicals above the ocean of commerce, amusing, impressing, or irritating cinema audiences hundreds of thousands of times over.

For 2025, we are planning our KinoLab in the B.L.O. studios in Lichtenberg, whose members are cordially invited. Our fundraising will be used to cover the costs of the event, such as rent of the venue, catering, equipment, advertising, archive and distribution.

Since 2006, we have also hosted monthly Open Screenings at the Moviemento cinema in Kreuzberg, providing a regular forum for filmmakers to project their own productions in a dignified setting and discuss them with the audience.
We have celebrated over 3,000 world premieres at Germany's oldest cinema and initiated hundreds of new film productions, which have also been shown here. We address our target groups of cinephiles, dreamers, hyper-experimentalists, and underground mavericks on social media and at film festivals, which we actively participate in.

Upcoming events (1)

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  • 16th International KinoKabaret Berlin 2025
    Kino Moviemento, Berlin
    • Photo of Kino Berlino