BUFF Malmö Film Festival is an international children’s and youth film festival, held annually in March. Since 1984, BUFF has been the most important screening window for films for children and young people in the Nordics.
– A BUFF film is told from the perspective of children or young people. Films that are 100% BUFF take their young audience seriously and make them want to return to the cinema again and again.
– Daniel Lundquist, head of programming
The party of the year for cineasts
BUFF is a film festival that suits everyone. Someone gets their very first cinema experience at BUFF. Someone shows their first feature film to a critical audience of children. Someone else gets inspired to tell stories with moving images themselves.
BUFF Film Festival brings the latest films from all over the world to Malmö – films that might otherwise never be screened in Sweden. BUFF strives to be the party of the year for both young and old cineasts and to give the audience a cinematic experience that makes them return to the cinema again and again.
During the festival, prizes are awarded in several categories. Read more about our awards and competitions here.
A meeting place
BUFF Film Festival is a meeting place for professionals who work with films for a young audience. Raising the voice for films aimed at a young audience is important in many aspects. BUFF wants to be an arena where we raise questions about access to good films for children and young people and the necessity of creating good conditions for the production, distribution and screening of films for a young audience.
Film criteria
What kind of films are screened at BUFF and how is the selection made? According to the following criteria, we work to put together the world’s best film programme for a young audience.
- BUFF screens films told from the perspective of children or young people.
- BUFF screens films that make you want to return to the cinema.
- BUFF screens films that complement the existing film selection and broaden children’s and young people’s image of what film is – films that avoid clichés and predictability.
- BUFF strives for a wide span in the programme – a mix of light and heavy, funny and sad, fantasy and realism.
- BUFF screens films that create recognition, but also understanding of things that are far from one’s own everyday life.
- BUFF strives for an even gender distribution, both in terms of representation in front of and behind the camera.
- BUFF strives for that children and young people of all ages, from preschool children up to high school age, should be represented in the festival’s films.
Film selection
In order to find the world’s best films for a young audience, we continuously visit various film festivals and markets, and keep ourselves constantly updated through contacts with distributors and producers. Each year, more and more films are submitted to the festival via our website. To make the selection of films for BUFF, the festival has put together two film groups: a feature film group and a short film group. Before each festival, BUFF’s film groups look through nearly 1,000 films.
Film groups
Feature film: Claudia Gutierrez, Tony Martelius Ågren, Mikael Matteson, Deborah Fusaro, Julia Granath, Måns Leonartsson, Moa Öhman, Khaeta Chittick, Daniel Lundquist.
Short film: Borut Cigale, Vincent Zeis, Lina Birk, Manuela Ayuste-Azadian, Christina Tsiobanelis, Tim Kronström, Sana Alshihani, Daniel Lundquist.
Film distribution
As part of our mission to broaden the diversity of excellent film for children and young people, we are distributing some of the best films screened at the festival – both as school cinemas and open screenings.
Read more about our films here.
Non-profit association since 1984
Board: Rolf Isaksson (chairman), Jens Lanestrand, Birgitta Killander, Mikael Mattesson and Helene Mohlin.
Awards
After more than 40 years, BUFF is an established phenomenon in Malmö, Sweden and in the film festival world. At the Guldbaggegala in January 2018, BUFF was awarded the Gullspiran honorary award for its work with children’s and youth films with the following justification:
“The Gullspiran honorary award goes to an organization that, year after year, has worked to strengthen young people’s identity with the help of the film. Through film screenings and seminars, they have made visible the importance of quality film and clearly demonstrated the importance of film’s power for children and young people. Gullspiran 2017 is awarded to the BUFF Film Festival.”
Back in 1992, BUFF received a Guldbagge for creative efforts for enthusiastic work in spreading good films for children and young people. In the same year, BUFF received the Nöjesguiden’s award “Malmö’s Spreader of Joy”.
Become a member
Take the chance to meet other film enthusiasts and follow along in the activities all year round. Do you want to become a member and help develop the festival of the future?
Email julia@buff.se for more info.
Year around
During the year, BUFF works to spread the festival to more locations around Sweden. Through BUFF in Sweden, festival films were shown on tour. Since 2017 BUFF is also a distributor of films for a young audience. BUFF also runs a film in hospital project, Buffilusk, which brings BUFF’s film selection to hospitalized children in Sweden through a digital platform. Since 2023, BUFF has been organizing National Film Week, a film week with the aim to get the whole of Sweden to strike a blow for film for a young audience.