For the second year in succession MEDIA Salles chose Kid Screen as the venue for the annual meeting of members of the Euro Kids Network, which was held on 24 October.

In the framework of the international event dedicated to cinema for children, Italian operators joined with exhibitors from countries such as Sweden, France and the United Kingdom in discussions on the problems facing the cinema theatre today, seen not just as an industrial outlet, but also as an educational tool and social meeting place. Speakers included Ingrid Höglind, from the Saga Bio cinema and the Lighthouse cultural centre at Kungsbacka in Sweden, who reported on a cooperative venture between cinema and local authority, an attempt to promote the cinema as a meeting place with a social and educational focus. Pascale Diez illustrated the project implemented by the Cinéma du Palais in Créteil, France, under the heading Dis-moi comment c'est chez toi: the aim here is to allow young filmgoers to explore Europe via the cinema, organizing a youth exchange involving several nationalities and based on the cinema as meeting place. Joining the French cinema as its partner in the venture is the Cinema dei Piccoli in Rome, also a member of the MEDIA Salles circuit.

By way of rounding off the annual meeting of exhibitors who have joined the Euro Kids Network, MEDIA Salles organized the fourth seminar on Audiences at Home and in the Cinema, addressing the issue of technological innovation and its impact on cinema consumer habits. Pierre Lévy, professor at the Hypermedia Department of the University of Paris VIII-Saint-Denis, Klas Viklund, director of the Skolbio project at Stockholm's Svenska Filminstitutet and Dick de Jonge, head of the Amsterdam-based Twin Film distribution and exhibition company, were the speakers who outlined the opportunities created in the cinema sector by the advent of virtual reality, digital technologies and multimedia. This was also the context for MEDIA Salles to present its European Cinema On-line Database, available on the Internet (http://www.mediasalles.it) and featuring information on almost 2,000 recent European films, with a further 2,000 production, distribution and exhibition companies. The Euro Kids section of the Database, created by MEDIA Salles in tandem with ECFA, is dedicated to children's cinema and aims to answer the needs of cinemas in this area, as also of teachers working in the field of education in audiovisual communication.