For over twenty years, the BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival has been presenting the cinema of authors, visionaries, experimenters and rebels. The first edition of the event, created by Roman Gutek, took place in 2001 in Sanok. Later, New Horizons was hosted in Cieszyn (2002-2005), and since 2006 it has been associated with Wrocław.
Attuned to new voices and narratives through images, stories and formal experiments, New Horizons has sensed the pulse of the contemporary world since its inception, and has been a catalyst for intellectual and spiritual ferment. Open to what keeps film art still young, the festival also looks to the past, recalling the achievements of the masters of artistic cinema. In recent years alone, we have organised retrospectives of Chantal Akerman, Nagisa Ōshima, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Angela Schanelec, Yvonne Rainer, Agnieszka Holland, Alain Tanner, Jonas Mekas, Bertrand Bonello, Joanna Hogg, Alice Diop, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Satyajit Ray and Wang Bing.
New Horizons has always been an interdisciplinary festival, where visual arts and music are widely presented alongside cinema. Filmmakers whose works are shown at New Horizons are eager to cross the boundaries of traditional cinema and enter the experimental field of visual and performing arts. That is why the festival's Artistic Stage, organised in cooperation with BWA Wrocław, is a natural extension and complement to the film programmes, presenting film forms in the so-called extended field as part of exhibitions in Wrocław galleries.
Accessible to all and boasting a unique, engaged audience, New Horizons combines various types of initiatives, including film screenings, educational activities, and industry meetings. In 2024, the festival achieved record attendance (167,538), with viewers choosing from 285 films and 650 screenings. Over 500 guests accepted our invitation, including several dozen directors from around the world.
The heart of the festival is the Nowe Horyzonty Cinema, the largest arthouse cinema in Central and Eastern Europe. As part of the festival, one of the largest open-air cinemas in Europe also operates on the Wrocław market square. Since 2025, we have been organising an open-air cinema at the OPT Zamek in Leśnica, thus reaching new spaces and audiences in Wrocław.
Number of seats for the audience
2330 seats at Kino NH
584 seats at DCF
999 seats at the Market Square
250 seats at OPT Zamek
Each year, the festival is made possible by:
60+ organizers
45+ cinema service staff
~200 volunteers
We’re on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Letterboxd.
We talk a lot about cinema and the festival: in the New Horizons Podcast and in the New Horizons After Hours group.
The festival is organized by the New Horizons Association.