Together, we bring the magic world of film to children in hospitals

Jeugdfilmfestival Antwerpen or JEF is one of the founders of Film in Hospital consortium back in 2014. They have been bringing film magic to hospitals all over the Europe for more than 10 years alongside with BUFF (Sweden) and Kids Meet Art (Croatia). Consortium grew bigger and bigger — from Il Nuovo Fantarca (Italy), Kinodvor (Slovenia) & Pack Magic (Spain) to Schlingel Film Festival (Germany) and Neaniko Plano (Greece) which created Olympia Film Festival.
Besides bringing film magic all over the Europe, JEF has been creating film magic in Antwerp & Belgium, and 2025 edition is just around the corner! Spring break in Belgium means only one thing: the most enjoyable festival for youth films, games, and audiovisual experiments. For young and old, during school and leisure time.

JEF is a grassroots-driven festival which involves their target audience and festival partners in participatory processes: together, they work on a large and innovative festival that is socially relevant and, above all, fun. The youth film festival is the perfect family outing during spring break but those who start festival seson each year are teachers. In the weeks before spring break, the festival already starts for schools though providing experience of the unique festival atmosphere during school screenings in Antwerp, Ghent, and Leuven.

As they say — it is a mix of cinema experiences and a digital playground 🙂

Check it out and enjoy their beautiful programme: https://www.jeugdfilm.be/festival#over_jeugdfilmfestival_antwerpen

We have been thinking about an Online Film in Hospital festival for the last few years since we wanted to have an activity held at the same time in all (or just many 🙂 hospitals whom we cooperate with. But it was not as easy as we thought it would be 🙂 But we found a way to — start! So, we did a national version, let even say a trial version — Online Film in Hospital held in Croatia and it was — beautiful!

But we wanted to make it special so we’ve invited Iwa Dugač, directress of The Children’s Rights Festival, a prominent festival which puts focus on children in several ways among which we foung most interesting is — their film programme. We’ve gathered 20 participants from 4 cities: Pula, Rijeka, Zagreb and Ivanec and presented one of the films from this year’s programme and celebrated International children’s day!