The unique educational project that brings together five of the most important film festivals in Spain, has reached 365,906 young viewers in its fifth edition.

This initiative, promoted by the International Film Week of Valladolid, Seville European Film Festival, Festival de Málaga, Huelva Film Festival, and Sitges Film Festival, aims to foster film education among young people. It counts on the collaboration of the FILMIN film platform to achieve this goal. In 2024, 1,000 educational centers from primary schools and secondary schools (ESO and Bachillerato) signed up, with nearly 2,000 teachers participating from Castilla y León, Andalusia, and Catalonia.

The Ventana Cinéfila program, curated and agreed upon by the programmers of each festival, offered seven feature films and two short film programs through the free online FILMIN channel, available from mid-October to the end of November 2024.

A new feature in this edition was that the festival programmers responsible for the selection recorded video introductions for each of the feature films and short film sessions, providing thematic and stylistic insights as well as historical and cinematic context before the screenings in the classroom.

In addition, nine complete didactic guides were prepared in both Spanish and Catalan, available for teachers to work with students and enrich the class discussion before and after the viewing. This didactic material is produced by the social initiative cooperative Drac Màgic, dedicated to the study and dissemination of audiovisual culture, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2021 and whose most outstanding projects include 'Construir Mirades', an educational initiative for training in audiovisual languages; the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona, a film festival directed by women; and Pack Màgic, a distributor of children's films.

In terms of programming, in this fifth edition of Ventana Cinéfila, and unlike previous editions, short film programs were the most popular, with animation and live-action titles. Nature and the environment were the protagonists of these programs, along with themes such as the animal world, friendship and empathy or female empowerment. The short films selected for high schools dealt with gender identity, sexual diversity, awareness of climate change and the power of social networks on teenagers.

The selected feature films were Beautiful Thing by Hettie MacDonald (UK, 1996), a coming-of-age story about the romantic awakening of two gay teenagers in the tough environment of a London working-class district, with the fear of rejection because of their sexual orientation; The Newcomer by Rudi Rosenberg (France, 2015), about a new boy arriving at a school where no one pays attention to him; and La Suprema by Felipe Holguín (Colombia, 2023), a story about a teenage girl from a remote and isolated village in Colombia who dreams of becoming a boxer.

Animation was also present in Ventana Cinéfila with Calamity by Rémi Chayé (France, 2020), a coming-of-age western about a heroine in the conquest of the Wild West, winner of the Annecy Festival; The Castle Through the Mirror by Francesca Calo, Keiichi Hara, and Takakazu Nagatomo (Japan, 2022), an extraordinary anime about a group of teenagers with complicated and lonely lives; The Adventures of Little Colón by Rodrigo Gava (Brazil, 2016), in which three little friends – Christopher Columbus, Leo Da Vinci, and Mona Lisa – embark on a ship to an island where, according to legend, a hidden treasure awaits; and The Mud Demons by Nuno Beato (Portugal/Spain/France, 2022), a Goya Award-nominated story about the reconciliation of a city-dwelling young woman with her rural roots.

Ventana Cinéfila was created in 2020, and in its five editions, it has programmed a total of 37 feature films and 69 short films, grouped into different programs for each age range.