Collaboration Between the Frooom! Film School and the CinEd Project

Maybe you’ve noticed posters around town for the Frooom! Film School. If you’ve wondered what it is and whether your child would be a good fit, you’re in the right place because we’re bringing you a detailed description of their workshops.

Frooom! is a creative program of both fun and educational nature that has been offering children and young people the opportunity to enter the world of film beyond the standard cinema or TV viewer experience since 2012. It was established under the auspices of the Shadow Casters Association and thus relies on their educational and artistic methods known to the public. Additionally, Frooom! closely collaborates with the CinEd project, providing participants access to a collection of European films.

Some of the films created in these workshops are screened across the globe, from Japan, Bangladesh, India, Canada, the USA, Brazil, Australia, to all over Europe.

Because of this impressive description, we decided to get in touch with the project leaders to introduce you to their programs, participants, and their role in all of this. Our interviewees are Mia Maros Živković, the head of Frooom!, and Ivana Šešlek, the head of CinEd.

Mia has been managing and coordinating Frooom! since the beginning of 2023, and she has been leading introductory and advanced workshops since 2018, although she wasn’t the project’s originator. – The initial leader of Frooom! was Boris Bakal, who still coordinates the workshops today. They were created 12 years ago when such workshops were not common, especially full-day ones where children were in good film hands with professionals, enjoying a nice warm meal and ending with a product they could be proud of, Mia tells us.

Apart from Mia and Boris, the film school heavily involves workshop leaders, mostly film professionals ranging from actors, screenwriters, editors, directors to psychologists and film therapists who participate in the program. The leaders are carefully chosen, often friends of the Shadow Casters whom they trust to take care of the children. – Each introductory group must have a psychologist who pays attention to individual behavior. Participants are meeting for the first time, ranging from 7 to 11 years old, so one never knows how each child might react to certain things or films. Some come to us shy, some full of energy, so it’s always good to have a professional in the group. We ensure the safety of participants, although this does not mean that something cannot happen at our workshops, just in case, she adds.

As mentioned earlier, Frooom! offers introductory and advanced workshops, and Mia tells us they approach each education through play. – We sit in a large circle and get to know each other through play. We try to remember the name of each individual because filmmaking is a team process and if you don’t know someone by name, it can be very embarrassing and disrespectful to your colleague. We approach teaching film theory and new concepts in a maieutic way, which means we give everyone the opportunity to think for themselves what they think it could mean, and in this way, we go together towards the correct answer. At the advanced workshop, all these elements are repeated through the creation of a film. In the introductory workshop, they shoot stop-motion animation, and they go through the live aspect in TV format; for example, news, quiz. An experimental film is also shot, where children play using sounds and shapes using a projector or an old slide projector.

The advanced workshop is more concrete in terms of filmmaking because it goes into detail. So after the idea, they write a screenplay, sometimes even a shooting script, explore locations, find actors from other workshops or they themselves act, and shoot, and they change during shooting with the camera and sound. That way, they try everything, and they easily see which part is their favorite.

Although these processes repeat from workshop to workshop, each cycle brings something new that many participants return to multiple times, so from last year, there are also Frooom! workshops for older people, from 15 to 18 years old.

Although the main focus is on film, Frooom! offers participants much more than that because together with their colleagues, they learn about unity and practice it and share a common interest with them. Here they have the opportunity to see something that school will not offer them and so in some way, they grow up in a slightly different environment from their peers by spending time with professionals who, unlike teaching, in this case listen to students and let them express themselves in their own way. – We travel with them to festivals, they have the opportunity to jury films at festivals, attend interesting workshops outside Croatia. Last year we were in Brussels at a film festival. This is an exceptional opportunity that offers experience, friendship, networking and finished products that are created at each workshop, and as you grow up and go through each new workshop, you realize how you change through these works, so I would say that we also provide them with knowledge. It’s nice when you realize early on what interests you in life and where you see yourself in the future, concludes Mia.

Mia is not alone in all of this, but together with the Frooom! team, she closely cooperates with the aforementioned CinEd. Specifically, facilitators have access to the impressive CinEd film collection that they can show participants. So we also spoke with Ivana Šešlek, the head of this project, who explained more about what the CinEd project is. – CinEd is a European program for film literacy of children and young people, but also for teachers and educators who work with them, involving 13 countries. In CinEd, we approach film more theoretically; we discuss the context of the films we watch, film techniques, genres, themes addressed, and how they are presented, connecting them with other disciplines and daily life and critically reflecting on film, learning to “watch” in this way.

Frooom! Film School is more oriented towards practical work. Precisely because of this, combining CinEd and Frooom! is the best way to go through both the theoretical and practical parts with participants and give them a comprehensive approach to film, Ivana explains, adding why this collaboration is so successful. – The idea was to use the truly rich CinEd collection of European films, available on the CinEd digital platform, to inspire and educate Frooom! film school participants to be even more creative when shooting their own films. The collection includes selected films of various themes, genres, and types – short, feature-length, animated, fiction, experimental, documentary, hybrid, contemporary, and classics – so within each Frooom! we organize a CinEd masterclass workshop with a different theme or technique, led by experts in the field focused on.

In addition to collaborating with Frooom!, CinEd has a rich program aimed at teachers in primary and secondary schools, as well as educators working with children and young people. – The education provided by the Shadow Casters Association can be divided into two groups: film screenings for children and young people aged 6 to 19, followed by discussions and workshops, and professional development for teachers and educators on the use of the CinEd digital platform and film for educational purposes in working with children and young people aged 6 to 19.

Encouraged by the introduction of film education into the curricula of primary and secondary schools, both in Croatia and across Europe, our goal is to introduce children to the cultural diversity of Europe through film and encourage them to critically and analytically reflect on the world around them visually and content-wise. We believe that these knowledge and skills are necessary for children and young people in the age of hyperproduction of information, and it is precisely through film, as a comprehensive art form, that they can practice and acquire them, Ivana concludes.

Now that you know everything, you might be interested in when you can apply your child to Frooom! and what they can expect. At the upcoming summer workshops, from June 24th to 28th and July 1st to 5th, as usual, we have our introductory and advanced workshops, and for participants who have completed our main workshops, we have prepared a video game design workshop. Furthermore, we have a special editing workshop and a Glitch workshop aimed at ages 14 to 18. In the same term, we also have workshops in Koprivnica. In August, Frooom! Rijeka awaits us at the Children’s House – Mia says.

Interview conducted and text written by: Lućana Jakelić