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Description
Experienced educators and film professionals from Norway and Latvia,RIGA IFF will create an online film club.Tailored especially for children aged 9–15 years old and available everywhere in Latvia.RIGA IFF Film Club will consist of a series of 10 interactive workshops in the form of pre-recorded videos. In each video,a different aspect of film and filmmaking will be covered,allowing the audience to understand how films are made and to deconstruct the content they are viewing.The project will deliver mobile and easily accessible film viewing experience,paired with sustainable and fun educational workshop videos.By joining the film club, children and educators will gain access to a curated filmography of Norwegian family films, suitable for children aged 9-15 years old and allowing to look at the world from the perspective of their Norwegian peers,as well as addressing important topics such as relationships with family and the surrounding world,school life and speaking against bullying,self-esteem,honesty, inclusiveness,social responsibility as well as consideration towards environment among other themes.Before viewing the films, children will be hearing from film professionals,getting to peek behind the scenes of filmmaking and test their knowledge.By guiding the children through the workshop in a gamified,immersive and interactive manner,we hope to achieve that they do not feel like in a classroom,but rather like they are viewing a YouTube video along with friends–experiencing the ease,playfulness of the format,yet viewing educational content.This is important,because the added value of the RIGA IFF Film club is also its ability to draw attention to the audio-visual social media content–our aim is to provide children with more critical thinking and analysis tools,in order to help them grow into smart and conscious media consumers that are not easily manipulated by fake news.
Summary of project results
The project RIGA IFF Film Club was needed because there was a lack of informal film and media education available across Latvia. Within the project and with the counsel of the project partners – NFK – we created an online film club which is composed of specially crafted video lectures by Latvian film professionals, exercise sheets and a selection of 10 Norwegian children''s and youth films. A programme of Latvian films was crafted for screening across film clubs in Norway, allowing Norwegian youth to see the life of their peers in Latvia, through a film screen.
We managed to reach not only schoolchildren and teachers from different regions of Latvia, but also those adults and university students, who are interested in cinema and liked to learn more. We hope that the RIGA IFF Film Club project, especially the video lectures, helped to discover cinema and filmmaking in a different light – as a synergy between different professions and people. We also hope that insight in the “backstage” of filmmaking helped decipher moving images (film, audiovisual media, etc), rendering the target audience – youth and children – more media savvy.
Judging by the feedback, the project has been useful in helping to master the cinematic and audiovisual language – a language the youth nowadays “speak” a lot, by making social media video content and being exposed to audiovisual materials more than any other generation before them. The project helped to understand the rulebook of cinematic language, composition of the image that we see on cinema screen or social media screen on our smartphone. Pupils have been using RIGA IFF Film Club as a tool to prepare for making their short films – be it as a hobby or a school assignment. Long-term importance, we believe, lies in the fact that RIGA IFF Film Club seeks to build bridges between the younger generations and cinema, by portraying it as a potential career opportunity, or means of an expression or as a cultural project. In a world where cinema-goer demographics is increasingly older, we see that this is a way of helping to conserve the value of the European and Nordic audiovisual culture in the eyes of younger generations.
Summary of bilateral results
As a result of the bilateral cooperation, film programmes with Norwegian and Latvian films for children and youth were created and acquired for screening in the respective countries (Norwegian films in Latvia – online kinoklubs.rigaiff.lv, Latvian – in physical film clubs across Norway). Also, insights from the experience of Norwegian film clubs contributed to the idea implementation in Latvia; they helped to formulate that film club (online or on-site) is an effective format of informal film education, community creation. Norwegian partner''s (NFK)'' insights basically shaped our approach to RIGA IFF Film Club and the way we communicated it.