In cooperation with the music video competition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the festival offers a specially curated programme of music videos for young people aged 14 and older. Whether expressive performances, surreal animations or amazing hybrid forms, music videos in the cinema are a special experience on the big screen and with a good sound system.

Since 2024, 10 students from our secondary partner school have become curators of their own programme. In the so-called “Short Takeover”, they are given the opportunity to view and select films in a guided workshop and curate them into a programme. The students present and moderate this programme at the festival and discuss with the filmmakers on site.

Organised in cooperation with the secretariat of the German Bishops' Conference: Church and Society of the Protestant Church in the Rhineland and Westphalia, this workshop is aimed at religion teachers in particular. Outstanding contributions from the current Children's and Youth Film Competition are viewed together, analysed and discussed with regard to their use in religious education. Every year, Matthias Film and the Katholisches Filmwerk purchase films for educational work under the title "Edition Kurzfilmtage".

It has become a tradition: Now in its fifth year, all programmes of the Youth Film Competition are equipped with German subtitles for the hearing impaired. The screenings in the 12+, 14+ and 16+ programmes are also accompanied by sign language interpreters on request.

Under the titel "Look closely" we offered a shortened programme with fewer films for the Children's and Youth Cinema of the 70th and 71st International Short Film Festival. This is about how films can use different means to convey stories with little or no dialogue. The shortened form of the programme leaves more time to talk about what has been seen. The programme is particularly suitable for classes at federal schools.

Organised in cooperation with the secretariat of the German Bishops' Conference: Church and Society of the Protestant Church in the Rhineland and Westphalia, this workshop is aimed at religion teachers in particular. Outstanding contributions from the current Children's and Youth Film Competition are viewed together, analysed and discussed with regard to their use in religious education. Every year, Matthias Film and the Katholisches Filmwerk purchase films for educational work under the title "Edition Kurzfilmtage".

The film education project Trained Eyes ties in with a core area of our Festival’s film education activities: Training the eye, using cinema as a place to show outstanding films, strengthening short film’s special potential and making it accessible for (film) education. Trained Eyes, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, brings pupils into the cinema and short film into schools.

After the first round of Trained Eyes in the 2022/2023 school year, when five schools from Oberhausen, Bielefeld, Ratingen and Troisdorf participated, the second part of the project took place in the 2023/2024 school year. The concept of the second workshops was changed based on the experience gained in the first round. The focus was not on the intensive study of a single selected short film, but on the compilation of short film programmes by the pupils themselves. The programmes were to be presented to the project participants' classmates in the cinema. So it was the other way round – the pupils became curators, writers, public relations officers and presenters in the screening venue.

Three classes / study groups from the 8th and 9th forms of three Oberhausen schools, comprising a total of 70 pupils, took part. The film selection was largely supplied from our Festival's distribution catalogue and brought together experimental, narrative and documentary formats. More than 650 Oberhausen pupils and teachers watched the three screenings of the resulting 60-minute short film programme.

The participating classes presented their experiences with the project at the Children's and Youth Cinema of the 70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

"Off to the online seminar!" was the motto in 2020 for the young audience of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.Here they were introduced to exciting perspectives on current topics and looked intensively at details in the cinematic realisation. The online seminar was designed to last about 90 minutes. An offer in cooperation with the filmothek der jugend NRW.

One topic - two films: Hair, hairstyles, beauty - that can keep you pretty busy. What is beauty anyway, are there standards and who sets them? What expectations can one bow to? What limits do you have to find for yourself? In DOLÁPÒ IS FINE and MY HAIR two young black women have to take a special look at these questions.

The project Seeing the Other, launched in 2017, explores the potential of short films for political education. Members of the Youth Parliament of Oberhausen view films from the programmes and archive of the Festival, searching for films and themes that occupy and move them. The result is a film programme curated by young people for young people at the interface of politics and (short) film. The participating young people moderated the programme and led the discussion with the audience.

Children are unbiased and open-minded when it comes to movies. In order to strengthen and preserve this quality, however, they need offers outside their viewing habits. In the Children’s Choice project, which ran from 2011 to 2013, primary school pupils from Oberhausen intensively studied the genre of experimental short films and conducted their own experiments to reflect on what they had seen. The children selected their favourites from the films they watched together and presented them in their own programme during the festival. Children’s choice was sponsored by the BHF-Bank Foundation.

From 2011 to 2016, schoolkids from Oberhausen addressed the question "How do I see you?" in the run-up to the Festival. In writing workshops, they developed their own texts on this question in order to convert them into jointly produced poetry clips. The results were filmic insights into the lives of young Oberhausen residents, which were presented and awarded prizes at the festival. The Poetry Clip Competition was launched together with the Peter Ustinov Foundation and was a collaboration between the Festival and Energieversorgung Oberhausen.