Euro movie makers

The final objective of “Euro Movie Makers” is to make a movie (short or middle-sized). It’s aimed at every profile of pupil, evsenthough it was made at first for pupils with troubled economical and social backgrounds with a difficult approach to learning. Designed in a REP+ middle school (French classification for schools located in troubled and poor areas), the project was born with the wish to get our students out of a cultural desert. It was also born as the heir of a long series of projects via the Comenius and the Erasmus programs. Coming after Esperanto, music and sport, cinema will be the fourth universal language explored by our school in a European funded program. Cinema is already well known in our school thanks to a Cine-Club that was born 2 years ago. It’s also a popular medium of communication and exchange between the cultures but also a common ground for understanding, allowing every one to express one’s feelings and views. 

Making a movie requires technical as well as management skills: writing, playing, operating a camera, sound recording, team management, etc. These elements all connect to items of the common European knowledge and culture basis for the students. Whether it’s foreign languages, IT, communication skills or artistic expression, they are all items used to evaluate the pupils and part of their curriculum. They are all elements which will be later useful in the life of our pupils.

Our partners will be 4 other middle schools located in 4 different countries: Italia, Greece, Romania and Spain. Every one will do its part and provide their very own skills and techniques and / or original and typical landscapes to shoot the movie: it’s all about putting forward the local specificities, cultures and landscapes. This will allow the pupils to get to know their neighbours and the taste the otherness and diversity of the Union. Every partner will also activate its

network of film festivals, local institutions and organisations that can help the making of the movie but also the aftermath since it will be sent to film festivals. We have made up an organisation that will allow this project to take place both in distance and during the exchanges. Every group in every country will have a weekly hour dedicated to working on the project and preparing the final task. Collaborative writing will be used to write the screenplay during these moments as well as editing, and post production thanks to softwares that we’ll train them to use. They will do everything on this film: screenplay, acting, operating, sound recording, editing, making the music, make up, costumes, etc.

As teachers we will propose a frame, an outline of the screenplay in order to make it easier for them and keep them on tracks, to guide them during the writing phase. It will be about a European size investigation on an art robbery case, divided in five chapters (1 per exchange). The main character will be played by a different actor every time. Every chapter will feature local specificities and cultural references.

There you have a project which triggers the use of mutiple skills, in a funny and stimulating context allowing pupils to improve their cultural knowledge of Europe and their European citizenship.