So far in these most recent steps, we have looked at what the cinema experience offers, how a cinema might be used as a classroom and how schools and cinemas differ. But how are big school-cinema partnerships managed? In this step we consider larger scale school-cinema programmes and look at one programme in a little more detail: the School-Cinema-Weeks set up by Vision Kino in Germany in 2006.
Perhaps the largest national School-Cinema programme is in France, consisting of ‘Ecole’ and ‘College’ ‘au Cinema’, for 5-14 year olds, and ‘Lyceens et apprentis au cinema’, for 14-19 year olds. Between them, these programmes reach more than 10% of French schoolchildren and high school students, which is approaching 2 million people. The co-ordinating structures are complex, and include film distributors, cinemas, and regional and national education co-ordinators.
There are many other national programmes bringing schools to the cinema:
The festival runs for three weeks every November and brings 400,000 schoolchildren to film screenings.
in Finland
In Denmark, The Danish Film Institute runs this school cinema programmes.
Vision Kino’s National School Cinema Weeks operate in all 16 of the Lander, or regions, of Germany, and function as a partnership between film industry distributors, cinema exhibitors, and the school system. Vision Kino took inspiration from the UK’s Film Education, who ran National School Film Weeks annually from 1988 to 2012, and now 900,000 children visit the cinema in Germany as part of this programme. The funding is mixed between state, industry, and a small ticket price paid by each student.
