Across continents, languages, and cultures, children could be more than just passive viewers watching the world change. They are potentially the active creators waiting to shape our cinematic future. Through the shared magic of stop-motion animation, KORINCO by Minikino, BOGOSHORTS, and SESIFF unite kids across south KORea, INdonesia, and COlombia to bring their own imaginative stories to life.
Transforming shared classrooms into a global canvas
Festival programmers, educators, and curators across the globe were noticing a growing disconnect in how children consume media. For years, international film festivals have grappled with a quiet paradox: while they celebrate global cinema, the audiences they serve often remain passive consumers, separated by geography, culture, and heavily gated media ecosystems. Breaking down those walls requires planting seeds early, not just by screening films for young audiences, but by handing them the tools to create and providing an environment for them to learn hands-on. This shared realisation prompted the collaboration between MFW (Minikino Film Week Bali International Short Film Festival) from Indonesia, SESIFF (Seoul Yeongdeungpo International Extreme-Short Image & Film Festival) from South Korea, and BOGOSHORTS (Bogotá Short Film Festival) from Colombia.
This collaboration did not materialise overnight. Minikino has persistently developed short film literacy programs for over two decades in Indonesia. Long before the multi-country stop-motion animation program took shape, Minikino expanded short film literacy into the scope of visual creativity. In 2017, they launched a drawing competition known as Around The World in 25 Minutes, inviting children to watch short films together and then translate their emotional and visual impressions onto paper. By trusting children’s own intuition and giving them space to interpret cinema away from parental interference, these early workshops fostered independence.
Fast-forward to 2022: as part of the pre-events for Minikino Film Week 8, Minikino partnered with South Korea’s SESIFF to launch Let’s Draw Cinema. Because the time difference between Seoul, South Korea and Denpasar, Indonesia is just one hour, a live, synchronised online drawing workshop via Zoom became possible. Children from different hemispheres drew side-by-side, discussing their interpretations of the same cinematic language. Later that year, Minikino collaborated with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival for Sinema Sejuta Kata, inviting teenagers to view short films like Salmiyah (2019) by director Harryaldi Kurniawan and producer Wulan Putri. Translating their critical reflections into free-form poetry touching on gender, labour, and colonial history.
These recurring intersections with SESIFF laid fertile ground for deeper international trust. When the Indonesian Ministry of Culture introduced Dana Indonesiana, a multi-year strategic funding for major cultural organisations, it unlocked vital resources. This crucial support allowed Minikino representatives to travel and network internationally at festivals like Clermont-Ferrand, where connections with SESIFF and BOGOSHORTS finally crystallised into KORINCO in 2023—with BOGOSHORTS handling story development, SESIFF shaping the poster design, and Minikino anchoring production. Crucially, the funding also enabled Minikino to launch a wide array of public programs and conduct deep institutional research, allowing the organisation to critically examine its own identity and map out its core strengths in education. Building on this foundation, the three festivals made it a mission to stay true to inclusion and create an interactive environment that fosters children’s active involvement in creating animated films through stop-motion methods. Rather than treating youth merely as the passive future audience of cinema, the initiative empowers them to step into the role of future makers. By giving them hands-on tools to voice their own narratives, the program bridges the gap between media literacy and creative ownership, transforming media consumption into active artistic expression.
For the past four years since 2023 each festival has organised localised workshops where the overarching story is broken down into distinct scenes. A cornerstone of this local partnership in Denpasar has been SD Negeri 5 Dauh Puri, whose collaboration with Minikino began when their teachers visited the Yayasan Kino Media secretariat on Jalan Pulau Madura. Driven by an initial interest to introduce students to various film professions, this blossomed into a four-year engagement anchored by the Klub Sinema (Cinema Club) series—starting with four 90-minute sessions at Art-House Cinema MASH starting in December 2023 that introduced sixth-grade students to short films, cinema etiquette, family-themed narratives, small group critical discussions, and written reflections. Expanding on this deep local foundation, children between the ages of 10 and 12 from Indonesia, South Korea, and Colombia are then given tools and mentored by professionals to act as the true animators and narrators of their respective national segments. As Winda, the Education Coordinator of MFW 12, highlights from the workshops, this hands-on process brings profound cognitive lessons. Children quickly realise that crafting stop-motion animation is far from easy, learning patience as they meticulously move cut-out characters frame by frame to achieve smooth motion. Emotionally, the transformation is just as striking. The voice recording sessions—guided by mentors like Kak Birus—teach the children to balance fun with focus, encouraging them to take their performances seriously. Even if the character’s voice might initially sound silly or unserious to them, mentors taught them to embrace the absurdity, build self-confidence, and understand when to put their best effort forward. The segments are then gathered and woven together during post-production into a single, seamless short film that premiered across all three partner festivals.
Beyond the technical magic of stop-motion
In an era where children are increasingly isolated behind local digital screens, this cross-border initiative shatters those echo chambers. For children, seeing their familiar local Komodo dragon woven together with a South Korean tiger and a Colombian spectacled bear creates a completely unique experience. It teaches them that distinct cultural folklores do not have to stay separate; instead, they can intersect to form a shared narrative that proves friendship transcends the boundaries of distance and time. By working together on a single narrative, children from these three countries learn that while their languages differ, their creativity shares a universal language, transforming young minds from passive consumers into interconnected world citizens who recognise that their local stories have a place on the international stage.
To ground this global initiative in the community, each festival collaborates with their local alliances. In South Korea, SESIFF teams up with institutions like Chung-Ang University and local elementary schools. In Indonesia, Minikino partners with neighbourhood schools like SDN 5 Dauh Puri in Denpasar, engaging young students and teachers directly in the hands-on animation process. Meanwhile, BOGOSHORTS in Colombia leverages its local film agency network and cultural educators. These grassroots partnerships ensure that the workshops reflect the real-world environments of the kids participating.
Behind the creative magic, however, lies a fragile balancing act. In its fourth year, Minikino almost dropped out of the collaboration with post-festival funding stretching thin, and a skeleton crew left to manage MFW 12; the program faced a severe resource bottleneck. The program was saved by the valuable community spirit where BOGOSHORTS took more producing role this year in collaboration with Colombia’s Fiero Studio, which stepped in to help design the characters for the stop-motion workshop. The survival of KORINCO this year exposes a deeper structural question about the future of arts education. The long-term hope within Minikino is to establish a dedicated, year-round education division with a permanent staff. Yet, doing so opens a thornier ideological debate.
Managing a production across three continents is a masterclass in logistical tightrope-walking. This struggle mirrors a deeper ideological dilemma: while turning the program into a commercial product targeting affluent private schools or expatriate communities could secure steady capital, it would betray Minikino’s core ethos. The true mission is to keep film literacy accessible to everyday Indonesian children whose creative development is rarely nurtured by elite institutional budgets. Proving that global collaboration is possible is only half the battle; the real test is figuring out how to fund grassroots idealism without losing its soul. State funding and international grants provide essential breathing room, but as regime changes and budget caps threaten cultural ecosystems, survival essentially relies on the stubborn idealism of people who refuse to let the work die.
Ultimately, KORINCO proves that you don’t need a massive international infrastructure to foster creative ownership in children. Independent cinema clubs, school media rooms, and local community centres can easily scale down the blueprint. By breaking down storytelling into sequential parts, using accessible stop-motion apps, and collaborating with local educators, any film club or school can transform children from passive audiences into active creators right in their own neighbourhoods. Programs like KORINCO remind us that global solidarity is not built in corporate boardrooms but in the deliberate, handmade touch of human hands crafting stories with love, one painstaking frame at a time.
Editor: Fransiska Prihadi
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