Promoting film literacy as a teaching method in schools

The Other Europe’s Cinema encourages and promotes the use of cinematography as a teaching tool in class, providing and offering access to materials through an interactive educational platform, guiding teachers on how to use film literacy methods in class by organizing workshops for the teachers, it maintains the East-European film research network active through the first The Other Europe’s Cinema’s consortium meeting, and at the same time it encourages the students to think critically and analyze media instances, to discover history through an euro-regional approach and to stimulate their appetite for East-European cinematography through film literacy workshops and screenings organized in the partner schools.

Hidden behind the movie’s narrative there are dominant and alternative discourses related to the world in which we live in. The film analysis workshop aims to unravel these discourses. Through discussions we will try to discover the main themes and motifs, but also the secondary ones.
What should we pay attention to? What does mise en scene mean? How do we analyze the image, montage, the sound?
The students get accustomed to the film analysis vocabulary and will be able to appreciate the film aesthetics, the cinematographic elements. Also, there will be a certain focus on the importance of symbols, discourses, and recurring themes. This introductive and more technical section will include examples from classical and contemporary cinematography.
The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to the East-European cinematography and will have a more practical and hands-on approach.
The participants will look at several movie scenes and will have to pay attention to the above-mentioned criteria as well. The themes will be approached in a comparative manner, taking in consideration the euro-regional context. This means that a subject such as daily life in communism will be approached with examples from several East-European countries: How is this theme reflected in an example from Romanian, Bulgarian or Albanian cinematography? Which are the common motifs and where can we spot the differences?

The first workshops and screenings will take place in several schools from Timișoara, starting from the 15th of October 2020.

We will come back with more information about how to can sign up for the program, but until then, for more details, don’t hesitate to write to us: asociatia.contrasens@gmail.com.