Academia Film Olomouc

The festival features TV productions (BBC, Discovery, PBS), podcasts, YouTube channels, and on-demand broadcast, with the aim of science popularization.

It consists of exhibitions, interventions and events in public spaces, as well as AFO Echoes, which screens films from the festival in cinemas.

These films presented current scientific discoveries and innovations so as to be comprehensible to students and schoolchildren, as well as scientists, and gained an international reputation at the time.

The festival in Padua became a model for staff at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, who turned to Palacký University, known for an active programme of cultural events in the 1960s.

The university professor Jiří Stýskal sponsored the first screenings of science documentary films in Olomouc with his colleagues Eduard Petrů, Alena Štěrbová and Miroslav Tomšů in 1966.

Expert juries made up of Czech and international authors, producers, scientists and publicists, choose the winners of the competition categories.

Every dramaturge curates one of the thematic sections for which they select films, TV shows, lectures, workshops, guests and an accompanying program.

AFO Junior, targeting children and youth, is one of the regular thematic sections, run in cooperation with the Na Cucky Theatre, Fort Science and ČT Déčko TV channel.

Over the years, the accompanying program has features exhibits such as a huge ice cube in the festival graphic design on Horní náměstí, virtual reality shows in Auditorium Maximum, AFO graffiti and street art around Olomouc, outdoor screenings at the square, or 3D printer demonstrations.

The AFO Echoes program puts on showings of films from the main festival in other cities and towns, in venues such as observatories, schools, cafés, and cinemas.

The 4Science program section focuses primarily on professional networking in the field of education and science documentary films, connecting scientists, filmmakers and audio-visual industry representatives.

Recent guests have included: Albert Barillé, the French creator of the series Once Upon a Time... (2007); British BBC documentary maker Nigel Marven (2008); Jeff Lieberman, the American host of the Discovery Channel show Time Warp (2009); Andrew Holtz, author of the book The Medical Science of House, M.D.