KINO! is based on the belief that cinema is neither dead, not by far, nor has it been quite born yet, but rather emerges anew with every age reflected in its vision.

KINO! endeavours to spread cinematic culture as a way of defeating the delusions that reduce cinema to an industrial product and the viewer to a consumer.

KINO! is a space where impulses of free creativity come together. It believes in the necessity of breaking through the frameworks of the current social consensus and of transcending the established modes of existence.

KINO! assumes the stand of actuality that opposes, here and now, the demands of capitalism in its market logic of devaluating every form of revolt against it into merely another sort of a commodity.

KINO! does not distinguish between the local and the universal, but simply argues that, with its characteristics, the local can determine universal processes with the same credibility as the determinations of the general can.

KINO! establishes a space for an active communication between the currents of cinematic consciousness that reject the idea of political borders and cultural barriers.

KINO! is aware that what cinema needs is allied viewers who, with their visions, contribute to the sum total of an authentic cinematic event. It therefore strives for a deepening of the bond between the audience and the creator.

KINO! swears by the principle of mobilising the gaze that elevates pleasure through the awareness that a cinematic act can be the site of an active confrontation between the filmmaker’s and the viewer’s vision where paths are opened towards a liberation from the bonds of the established reception logic.

KINO! rejects the idea of the viewer as an object. It respects the viewer as a subject with full responsibility, who, in their own – oftentimes marginalised, repressed, exploited or depersonalised – existential position, can recognise the possibility of choice and find a space of self-awareness and (re)action.

KINO! is a non-profit, independent and utopian space.

KINO! is led by the belief that, from the viewpoint of creation, it is precisely the aspect of utopia that is of key importance. The utopia that connects cinema to its age and to the historical point of its emergence. The utopianism in which, through a historical perspective, films are watched in the past that begins here and now, but also in the future that began a century ago.

KINO! adheres to the demand to resist the endless destructive force pervading our time with a revolution of comparable creative energy, which is to reinforce memory, clarify dreams and allow images to mean.

Editorial board, 1st may 2007